Genre: Sci-fi/Western
Premise: In the future, people pay lots of money to visit a “theme park” that looks and acts like a real Old West town.
About: HBO is getting nervous. The cable channel that used to be satisfied solely with awards, got a taste of the high life when their behemoth, Game of Thrones, became a cash cow. Now, with Game of Thrones getting long in the tooth, HBO is looking for another superstar moneymaker to replace it. That task has been bestowed upon Westworld. HBO is hoping so badly for the sci-fi Western to replace the dwarves and dragons epic, that they paused production for four months so that they could retool the show and get it right. The show is being run by Jonathan Nolan, who’s co-written many of his brother’s (Christopher Nolan) scripts. He most recently created and ran the show, Person of Interest.
I’ve always loved the idea of mixing genres that don’t belong together. Sci-fi and Western, in particular, create an intriguing hybrid that practically begs you to check it out. And when I heard they were turning this 1973 film into a TV show on HBO, I thought, “This is going to be a winner.” I knew HBO had the resources to do this motherfucker justice. It wasn’t going to be one of those muddled sci-fi messes you got on SyFy or MTV.
And then I heard some terrible news.
Jonathan Nolan would be writing and running the show.
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.
I’m one of those guys who hates when people say, “The only reason so-and-so is in the business is because his dad/brother/wife/uncle is famous.” My argument is that even in the ranks of the nepotists, there are thousands upon thousands of actors/writers/directors trying to move up who don’t get anywhere because they simply aren’t good enough. I’ll even defend Max Landis, whose father being in the business actually, I believe, hurt him.
But Jonathan Nolan is someone who’s clearly ridden on the coattails of his way more talented brother, racking up “co-writing” credits on a lot of Chris’s bigger gigs, gaining enough “experience tokens” for the town to give him a shot at his own projects.
But I think we saw what happens when Jonathan Nolan is given sole writing duties on a big project when he penned Interstellar (his brother got co-writing credit but this is the first movie they made that Jonathan shepherded). That movie was a fucking mess. And the main reason it was a mess was because the writing was so shoddy. It had weird leaps in logic, huge plot holes, a bevy of odd choices, and an ending that was a personal assault on the collective intelligence of planet earth.
Ever since then, I don’t trust anything this guy is attached to. So it didn’t surprise me when HBO closed shop on Westworld’s production for a third of the year. I figured it was around that point that they realized Nolan had no idea what he was doing and they needed to help him rewrite all the episodes.
Well, we finally got the beginning of that retooling on Sunday, when Westworld premiered. The show follows a young woman named Dolores who lives in a small town in the Old West. We meet Dolores as she goes about her day, while concurrently listening to her in voice over as she’s interrogated by a man in a glass room.
You see, Dolores is a robot. Her job is to operate inside of this “Old West” town while real-life tourists come and enjoy what it must have been like to live in the Old West. Oh, there’s a catch. Dolores and all the other humanoid robots don’t know they’re robots. They think they’re real people, despite being de and re programmed in their steel and glass rooms every week, their memories wiped so they’ll be ready for the next crop of newcomers.
The pilot seems to embody the confusion that caused the production to shut down in the first place. I have no idea what the story is in this pilot. It jumps between the Old West and the “control room,” where the experience-runners attempt to keep everything running smoothly.
It also includes: a man in black (Ed Harris) who keeps showing up in strange places and can’t be killed. Other bad guy robots who rape and kill women. Dolores’s father, who’s also a robot, seems to be malfunctioning. We also get an out-of-town gang who seems to have no connection to the story show up and rob a bank. Oh, and finally, we occasionally drop in on Dr. Robert Ford, the creator of this place, who lives in an underground abandoned mall.
Confused? I know I was.
When the pilot ended, I asked myself, “Why would I want to watch another episode of this?” That’s the only question you need to have answered when you write a pilot. Once someone reads your pilot, they need to be DESPERATE to read the next episode. That’s usually accomplished by offering a series of unanswered questions. Which Westworld does have.
The problem? None of them are very intriguing.
Look at The Matrix. When you watched that first act, there was nothing you wanted more than to figure out WHAT THE FUCKING MATRIX WAS! Or Lost. Even you Lost haters. After the pilot, you wanted to find out why there were polar bears on the island, why there were monsters on that island. Maybe you hated the show as it went on. But it made you want to watch that second episode, I know that.
This doesn’t even accomplish that. Not through the writing at least. You may want to tune in because the production value is as good as a feature film, if not better. But is there any story reason why you want to keep watching this show? Not that I can see.
I guess the engine behind the story is: Will the robots realize they’re not real? And if so, what will they do about it? And I’m not sure that’s exciting enough for me.
And here’s where you can identify why Nolan is a weak writer. He gives away the biggest mystery – that these are robots living in the Old West – in the very first second of the script. Instead of giving us 1-3 episodes of living in this Old West town and showing us a bunch of strange things that make no sense, before revealing that some of the residents are robots and everything is being manipulated from a control room, he tells right off the bat.
Compare that to Wayward Pines, which was built on a similar premise. Except they drew the mystery of the town out as much as possible before telling us what was going on. It’s choices like this that make Nolan look like he’s in over his head.
And there are little things you pick up on that clue you in that you’re not dealing with a real screenwriter. Like the fact that Dolores is our main character, yet I have no fucking clue what she does for a living. We only ever seen her coming out of her father’s house. So is she a professional house exiter?
Good screenwriters know that details like this need to be conveyed right away. Bad or inexperienced screenwriters don’t even consider it because they don’t believe it’s important. You don’t think it’s important we know what your main character does? That’s Screenwriting 101 right there.
Westworld takes itself too seriously and feels like it was conceived by someone who doesn’t have a plan. If the first episode is this disjointed and unclear, what hope is there that future episodes are going to pull things together? A TV show always gets sloppier as it goes on. The pilot is supposed to be the one statue of solidarity. And this one’s already cracking.
I’m sure this show will have its fans due to the out-of-this-world production budget, which allows Westworld to look as slick as a Christopher Nolan film. But in the end, all the audience cares about is the story and the characters. And Westworld, at least judging by the pilot, doesn’t deliver on either.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Is the main unanswered question you derived for your series COMPELLING ENOUGH to make viewers want to tune in next week? Really think about that question. Because if there’s no compelling question, there are no viewers coming back. Westworld could’ve kept the robots and the control room a secret, and used the first few episodes to introduce a series of characters acting strange. That question would’ve propelled us to keep tuning in. Instead, they answered that question immediately and shifted the series’ primary question to, “Will the robots realize they’re robots, and when that happens, then what?” Uhhhh, I don’t really care about the answer to that question, so I’m not compelled to keep watching.
Why this is important: With television, you want to keep eyeballs on your show long enough so that the audience gets hooked on your characters. You can’t always do that in the first episode, since you’re crafting a story with a lot of setup. So you need to derive ways to keep the audience around for 4-5 episodes where they’ve been around your characters long enough that they’re now hooked on them. Without a strong unanswered question driving those early episodes, you’ll never get your audience to that point.
