One of the biggest questions facing HBO right now is which show will become the network’s most popular when Game Of Thrones eventually fades to black. For now, before it even premieres, some people think the answer could be Westworld.
On Oct. 2, HBO will take viewers inside “a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.” The new series is the story of a futuristic theme park that has a western concept, but is much more than that behind the scenes.
HBO first ordered the pilot way back in August 2013. At first, the show was set to debut in 2015, but that was eventually pushed back to October 2016 after multiple production delays shut down the entire operation last January. Script issues were reportedly the main issue.
“It’s a really complex interlocking story. We knew where we wanted to go and we knew exactly how the season ended where the kind of character arcs ended, but weaving those scripts and writing the dialogue for all these brilliant actors, it takes time,” showrunner Lisa Joy told Entertainment Weekly a couple months ago.
However, according to Entertainment Weekly, the production stoppage wasn’t done just to give showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Joy more time to finish the final episodes of the series’ first season. One of the stars of the show, James Marsden, revealed the stoppage helped them do a lot more.
“It wasn’t about getting the first 10 [episodes] done, it was about mapping out what the next 5 or 6 years are going to be,” Marsden said. “We wanted everything in line so that when the very last episode airs and we have our show finale, five or seven years down the line, we knew how it was going to end the first season – that’s the way Jonah and [executive producer J.J. Abrams] operate.”
Nolan added that when the show was pitched to HBO, the showrunners and writers actually pitched a plan for the first three to four seasons.
“I always feel like you want to have a sense,” Nolan said.
While season one has yet to begin, Nolan, brother of director Christopher Nolan, teased in the same EW piece what future seasons could look like.
“We didn’t want to have a story that repeated itself [each year],” he says. “We didn’t want the Fantasy Island version of this [where new guests arrive at the park every season]. We wanted a big story. We wanted the story of the origin of a new species and how that would play out in its complexity.”
Overall, the show looks to be exhilarating, crazy, and mind-numbing. The cast is full of big stars that could form one of the longest-running star-studded TV casts in recent memory: Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, and many more.
“The greatest work never comes easy and, in my opinion, that’s what we were dealing with,” Marsden says. “This show is very ambitious and grand in scale and in themes and very expensive with a giant cast. And bigger than all of that is what this show wants to say.”
Westworld premieres Oct. 2 at 9:00 pm EST on HBO.
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