2016 was a strong year for good television. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had one of its most vital and poignant seasons. Donald Glover made a timely, funny and honest sitcom about race in America with Atlanta. Netflix ushered in one of the most intriguing and, well, strangest new series with Stranger Things.
Despite the great successes these shows found, none were as big of a phenomenon as HBO’s Westworld. Westworld became an overnight sensation, with fans growing rapidly in size each week. In many ways, it stopped being a TV show and became a lifestyle.
It remains, without question, one of the most talked about series of 2016. From a ratings perspective, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead remain at the top of the chart — based on numbers that we get from Nielsen. Game of Thrones averaged more than 23 million viewers across all platforms during its most recent season. But while we have numbers for cable and premium cable networks, streaming services, like Netflix and Amazon Video, don’t have to provide data. We may never know just how big series like Stranger Things and The Grand Tour actually are.
What we do know is that Westworld had the biggest first season of any show in HBO history and scored an average of 12 million users a week. Even with its impressive numbers and fast growth in popularity that occurred over a few short weeks, Westworld is far from the best.
[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the first season of Westworld.]
Westworld is full of problems, but one of its biggest is that it didn’t figure out what type of show it wanted to be until around its sixth episode — and that’s being generous. We spend the first four episodes introducing various elements of each character, giving so much importance to everyone in the cast it’s hard for any one to stand out.
It starts off with two of the main hosts, Dolores and Teddy, but rapidly becomes about the park’s co-founder Arnold and lead engineer, Bernard. There’s also William and Logan, two visitors who become enamored with what the park offers. What about Maeve, the host who runs a local brothel? Maeve goes from being almost a minor character to one of the most crucial in a matter of a couple of episodes — from someone who has suspicions about what’s really happening within the theme park to the obvious leader of the host revolution against the humans who created them. Westworld got so caught up in trying to make sure everyone has their moment to shine, including characters like Lawrence, that it lost focus more often than not.
Westworld spent far too much time on the group of characters’ fact sheets instead of looking at the overall story until too late in the game. There were questions that went unanswered — like what happened to Elsie and Stubbs, two characters that mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps most concerning, there were too many moments where it felt like it was going to follow Lost into the abyss of never-ending hypotheses without ever finding out what happened.
Luckily, Westworld managed to avoid going down that route for the most part, but it felt far too much like a prequel for the next season. All 10 episodes of the first season felt like a prologue that had to be read before the reader could really get into the meat of the story. During the 90-minute finale, we got some insight into the point of the story that had been missing.
We learned that Dolores and Wyatt, a murderous host prototype, were interconnected, and that their slow rebellion was all a part of Ford’s new narrative he was writing for the park. We learned the elusive Man in Black was William, a time-hopping revelation that inspired an interesting backstory, but much too late to do anything with it. These moments should have happened earlier in the season so a story could have been built around characters’ responses and reactions, instead of just gimmicky revelations to appease an audience.
If the first season was learning the rules — the intricacies — of Westworld, the second season needs to be about why we should care about these characters and their stories.
The lack of feelings most of these characters elicited is another hurdle the show will have to address in its second season. It wasn’t that some were downright unlikable, like the Man in Black, but there just wasn’t enough storytelling happening within the reveals to start caring for the characters. We became so obsessed with trying to figure out what was going to happen next that we forgot the pawns in our game of chess were actual characters. Esquire’s Corey Atad wrote, “But where Westworld very nearly completely fails is that it is ultimately far more interested in being a prestige mystery box drama for a post-Lost, post-Game of Thrones age than actually being good art.”
Essentially, Westworld never says anything of importance. It dazzles us with mystery and gorgeous cinematography, but inevitable leaves us feeling empty due to the lack of storytelling.
Shows like Atlanta, Donald Glover’s dark comedy about trying to make it in the competitive world of hip-hop in Atlanta, had honest conversations about police brutality, poverty and racism in America. BoJack Horseman’s third season addressed issues like depression, alcoholism and drug addiction with an earnest and empathetic tone that most shows, animated or otherwise, fail to capture.
These are shows that started conversations about important topics relevant to issues that were occurring simultaneously in our society and, in that way, accomplished the same thing that classic series like All in the Family managed to do in the ‘70s. Television remained an important tool to have open conversations — just look at the episode on police brutality that Kenya Barris wrote for his series, Black-ish — but Westworld didn’t provoke important conversations; it simply entertained.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and I enjoyed it for what it was, but to call it the best show of 2016 would be disingenuous and wrong. It wasn’t until the final few episodes that Westworld seemed to really find its groove. And that was thanks to the online phenomenon surrounding the show more so than the quality of the storytelling itself.
I was someone who followed Westworld closely for a couple of reasons. It became the one show that almost everyone at Polygon was talking about and, we covered it, and its community, day in and day out. Simply put, it was my job to watch and obsess over Westworld with people. I was also a fan of the culture surrounding Westworld. I liked the weekly conversations about what some obscure reference could mean. As someone who grew up fixated with Lost, Westworld felt like a return to that time period.
There’s no question that what Westworld managed to accomplish this year is worthy of attention and praise, but to hold it to the same standard of other shows, like the refreshingly honest Insecure or the award-winning The People v OJ Simpson, is ridiculous. Westworld was entertaining television, in the same way that The Fast and Furious franchise is entertaining cinema; neither are great, but they’re exciting and beloved.
Westworld is being heralded as the series that could save HBO, with The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman calling it “precisely what HBO needed.” The question now is whether Westworld can sustain itself as something more than a weekly twist or reveal. Gimmicks only work for so long, and it already feels like Westworld has begun to overstay its welcome in that regard. The second season, which is due in 2018, will determine whether Westworld can become a great television series, or if it will suffer from an irreparable case of sophomore slump.
HBO doesn’t need another True Detective on its hands.
Comments
Disingenuous, huh? OK.
I disagree.
By Verr on 12.21.16 6:41pm
Julia’s coverage of Westworld is all over the place. I’ll start giving her opinions more credence when they start establishing more consistency.
By dejayc on 12.22.16 11:36am
"but Westworld didn’t provoke important conversations; it simply entertained"
Never mind discussions on the meaning of consciousness, what divides the perfect appearance of being something from actually being that thing, at what stage playing games(video games in our modern era, park narratives in Westworld) in which we kill people becomes morally/ethically reprehensible, the effects of a lack of consequences on human behavior, the meaning of free will when our actions are predetermined.
It was apparently all just mindless entertainment.
By MarcusMaximus on 12.21.16 6:52pm
I find the idea that a TV show can’t just entertain anymore, as a goal, to be extremely dumb.
(That said, I do agree with you 100%)
By thug_politics on 12.22.16 9:06am
The only thing I can see is that those weren’t "important conversations" in a real world sense? Police Brutality, Racism, Drug Addiction, Depression, etc. are all like tangible real things we’re actually dealing with in society.
The meaning of consciousness, the morality of killing things in videogames, and the meaning of free will are all flighty lofty concepts. Yes, they’re important, but as we currently don’t have Artificial Intelligence worth a damn they’re clearly topics that aren’t considered urgent.
That said, I definitely disagree with the author about their importance, but I perhaps see how they’re implying that AI Autonomy does not fit into modern society’s list of social justice causes.
By Linktm on 12.22.16 9:11am
The point is : morality of killing/oppression, greed and hidden agendas.
All the real-world problems you mentioned originated at some point from the so called fundamentals that are being looked at in this show. Govts today try to deal with terrorism by killing terrorists, but they never look at why and where these originate from. They do not try to help out the poor, uneducated, radicalised people to make them self conscious, know the meaning of society, provide jobs and make them feel like they belong. Instead just kill them but in killing them they are only creating more hatred and hence more people join in to do heinous crimes.
Westworld is looking at how things (mentioned above) shape up to become into bigger problems of the world.
By rockykoston on 12.22.16 11:17am
I think the problem with this angle is that the show doesn’t actually have a conversation about these things. It poses a question, and then answers it bluntly and absolutely. Are hosts sentient? Yes, but they are only truly sentient once they recognize their inner voice and make their own choices. Is their sentience different than ours? No, not in any meaningful way at all. When does killing become reprehensible? When the thing you are killing has feelings and thoughts.
The show force feeds you all of this, there is no meaningful room for discussion in the world it paints. At the end of the show we are not supposed to question any of these things, we are told what to feel. Dolores is fully sentient, the hosts’ suffering matters, their systematic torture and murder is a bad thing. If any of these things are not true, then the entire journey of the first season was meaningless and Westworld is now a theme park filled with shitty terminators that are easy to kill. Carpet bombing the park would be no different than setting fire to a crate full of graphing calculators.
Westworld only opens up interesting discussions if you ignore the conclusions the show forces on you.
By LazyPiranha on 12.23.16 12:57pm
You seem to have made a lot of conclusions about those questions and then decided the show forced it on you.
What does it mean to have "feelings and thoughts", and how would you ever know whether that’s the case? How do you even define feelings and thoughts as it relates to machines? At what stage do the utility functions and the like used by modern AI in, say, video games, gain those qualities?
We fault William for who he became because we became attached to Dolores, but removing yourself from that point of view for a second, can we really say where he went wrong? So far as he knows, he’s essentially just playing a live-action video game. If we have no issue with playing the latest Call of Duty, can we really fault him for essentially doing the same?
Even in terms of their sentience, Maive seems to be becoming sentient, except that all of her actions might be scripted. That raises questions about our own supposed free will, as all of our actions are completely pre-determined by our biology and the environment around us.
The creators of the show certainly seem to have some opinions and biases on these issues(it’d be kind of strange if they didn’t…) but they don’t provide any easy answers to them.
By MarcusMaximus on 12.23.16 4:06pm
The point isn’t that those questions don’t exist in general, the point is that the show doesn’t discuss them or explore them. You can use the show as a jumping off point for your own discussions and thoughts, but the world the show presents leaves no room for debate. Dolores is sentient, we know that because the show clearly lays out the requirements and she fits them all. You can have your own opinions, and your own theories, but the world of the show has only one answer, Dolores is real and alive.
The same thing applies to how humans behave in the park and how we’re supposed to perceive it. William guns down a child host, and we’re supposed to feel like this is some sort of massive transgression, something that would cause a person to have serious qualms. William feeling nothing is played off as a revelation to his state of mind. If William just shot an extremely elaborate fax machine, who cares? It would mean nothing at all.
Meave’s sentience is the same thing. The fact that Maeve is programmed to want to do the things she’s doing is supposed to raise questions about her true freedom, not whether or not she has feelings or opinions that matter. If we’re supposed to question whether or not her emotions are "real" then why do we care about what she does at all?
You can use West World as a jumping off point for these conversations, but the show leaves no room for debate in its own narrative. There is no discussion, you are lectured about it and told exactly what this all means at length and often. Hell Ford’s entire end monologue with Dolores bolds the point, underlines it, highlights it, and blows it up to a billboard.
By LazyPiranha on 12.24.16 11:31am
"Disingenuous."
I didn’t know that Polygon writers were the heralds of ultimate truth in the universe, and to hold other opinions is to be inherently misleading, not only to others, but I guess to ourselves as well. I’ll have to look deep within myself to check whether I was just programmed to like Westworld as much as I did. Truly, this article has opened my eyes to my own nightmare prison of sin that I wrap myself in to disguise myself from that singular truth.
By AlbatrossofTime on 12.21.16 6:55pm
Look, putting aside petty cliched argumentative rhetoric for a second, I expect more from Polygon writers than to use language like that. It’s one thing to bring up a viewpoint that is contrary to the zeitgeist, hell, that is to be applauded. It’s another to suggest that people are inherently being disingenuous about their opinions, and comes across as either incompetent analysis or arrogant pretension. Quite frankly, it is offensive, and I thought Polygon was better than that.
By AlbatrossofTime on 12.21.16 7:04pm
Polygon has been pretty muddy of late. I don’t know if it’s the time of year or what, but even their basic information based articles are becoming poorly written/full of inconsistencies or errors. A lot of their opinion pieces and reviews are starting to become puzzling as well.
"but Westworld didn’t provoke important conversations; it simply entertained"
This might be more of a crime than the disingenuous comment to me personally, but then that might just be because it came before. This show had overt conversations about a number of topics that have never been broached in film or television. And trying to adjust to the knowledge that the person who wrote this was, I guess, ignorant of what was being talked about? It kind of unravels a lot of what is said in this piece.
I also have a hard time grasping the complaint that there wasn’t enough story/storytelling. It isn’t until the back end of the season that we’re given actions that have no overt purpose to them until a reveal. For a show with as many reveals as this one had, everything leading to them is contained in meaningfully present arcs beautifully. I guess maybe it has to do with the show being about the act of storytelling as much as it is about consciousness and identity? That the constant pulling back of the curtain and examination of the strings was mistaken for undoing plot rather than being it? I don’t know.
This might all also have to do with the critique I often hear about not caring for the characters. One I don’t understand. Maeve is one of the most engaging and thoroughly sympathetic characters I saw on television this year. Bernard right behind her as well as Dolores and ultimately Ford. And everything to do with William was great from the get-go. My only real critique in this area had to do with a lack of obvious threat to characters early on, but then that was also quite refreshing considering how masturbatory peril has become in modern television.
By trashmyego on 12.21.16 7:36pm
I’m with you on puzzled. This author in particular tends to write articles where afterwards I’m left completely confused and feeling like they’re from another dimension or something. Every negative aspect listed about a piece of media tends to be the exact opposite of my experience with it.
By MarcusMaximus on 12.21.16 7:53pm
You’re making the classic mistake of assuming that this writer’s opinion is meant to invalidate your own. It is not. She believes that Westworld is not the best show of 2016. That is her opinion. This article is an opinion piece. The writer is not required to preface every sentence with the phrase "In my opinion" for the same reason that you don’t start your persuasive essays from highschool with the phrase "I think..," because it’s repetitive and unnecessary and already assumed by the nature of the form.
By flyingsaucers on 12.21.16 7:57pm
That’s a hard defense to swallow when it’s defending a statement like:
‘but to call it the best show of 2016 would be disingenuous and wrong.’
Especially when that statement is made in a piece that is as much in response to other’s opinions as it is about expressing her own. It’s poor choice in language if it’s truly meant to be part of a discussion and not there to invalidate.
By trashmyego on 12.21.16 8:08pm
It’s just poor and somewhat careless writing. Polygon has been missing the boat when it comes to Westworld all year. I swear I read an article here that complained about the show’s complexity; it was basically ‘reading is hard’ as applies to television. Ridiculous.
WW was THE most talked about show of the year in my office, and most of us loved Stranger Things, late season GoT, Daredevil, etc.
By ForkInSocket on 12.21.16 10:37pm
That’s the problem with this particular piece, it is attempting to invalidate others opinions. It says "…to call it the best show of 2016 would be disingenuous and wrong"
That’s not a critique of the show, it’s a critique of your opinion of the show. It’s saying that if this is your favorite show of the year, you are either lying or wrong.
By JimDime on 12.21.16 8:10pm
Her stated opinion is also that to believe otherwise indicates a lack of integrity. That’s still a valid opinion and she’s welcome to it but holy hell is it arrogant.
By MarcusMaximus on 12.21.16 8:13pm
That’s fine. She also said that anyone who says that they think it is the best show of 2016 is not merely disagreeing, indeed, they’re not even merely wrong, but rather that don’t actually believe that and they’re being actively dishonest when they say they do.
If you don’t see the problem then you don’t understand the word ‘disingenuous’. Quite possibly, neither does Julia, but whether you think she meant it or not, don’t pretend that people aren’t reacting to what she actually said.
By The_Ewan on 12.22.16 12:18pm
I think I’m pretty much the opposite of the author here. I loved Westworld, but I hated the community that sprang up around it. I felt like I was trying to enjoy a movie, and everyone I work with and everyone on reddit was at the theatre theorizing aloud about it the whole way through. The OP seems to think that in order to have a message or be art, you have to be talking about something that is culturally relevant to their east coast millennial sensibilities. What about broader topics such as the nature of consciousness and how we treat things we perceive not to have one. Does this not make you think… Sure their not speaking to hot topics swirling around Brooklyn right now, but they are saying something, race is important but not every piece of art has to be about race. Speaking of art, I really think people are losing sight of looking at art and enjoying it for themselves without going online and seeing what other people thought about it. Art is meant to be meditated upon, we’re too busy talking.
By jkinetic on 12.21.16 7:01pm
"I think I’m pretty much the opposite of the author here. I loved Westworld, but I hated the community that sprang up around it."
Pretty much sums up my feelings regarding the internet and pop culture for the last 10+ years. What good there is seems constantly drowned out by the bad.
By phimseto on 12.22.16 1:08am
Obsessive fan communities are the worst. No, I don’t want to hear your fan theory about Westworld or Game of Thrones or Mr. Robot. I want to watch the shows as they air and experience this feeling they call "surprise." Why not just live in the moment instead of predicting what might happen five episodes from now?
By CausticAvenger on 12.22.16 3:02am