Week-to-Week: Westworld, Peak TV, and Returning to the Maze
How I accidentally started watching (and enjoying) Westworld Season 4
Following its third season, HBO’s Westworld was a shell of its former self culturally speaking. While the second season had seen a dropoff in critical acclaim, it still garnered a host—pun intended—of major Emmy nominations. By the third season, though, Jeffrey Wright and Thandiwe Newton stood alone, and the show failed to win in any of the creative arts categories the show had once excelled in. And beyond Emmys, it legitimately felt like none of the conversation around the show was bleeding into general discourse: while it no doubt maintained strong communities dedicated to discussing it, labyrinthian as it is, Westworld was no longer the kind of appointment television HBO has been known for, and which the show was for its first two years.
As such, the discourse around its fourth season has been a fascinating test of the ability for a show to “bounce back” in a Peak TV era. If your social media feeds are anything like mine, they were full of tweets about how against all odds, Westworld was good again—just look at this example from Episodic Medium subscriber and Decoding Westworld—now Decoding TV—host David Chen.
We’ve talked a lot about how the reality of Peak TV is shifting our impulse to start a particular series, but what I found in the midst of the Westworld discourse is that the sheer volume of content makes it nearly impossible to convince me that returning to a show I’ve given up on is worth my time. Once I have mentally decided that I am both personally and professionally able to move on, expecting me to re-invest in a series is too much of a burden in the abstract, and thus I made no conscious effort to return to Westworld for its resurgent fourth season. And the ratings suggest I was not alone, with the show now drawing less than 25% of its second season ratings, and less than 50% of the ratings for the already fading season three.
However, I’m writing this newsletter not to emphasize the facts about Westworld’s fall from grace, and more to acknowledge that without trying to, I have returned to Westworld—I happened to be present when the sixth episode of the fourth season was being watched, and the same was true the following week, and thus I have unwittingly reentered the maze, as it were. The result has been equal parts disorienting and fascinating, with my admittedly incomplete perspective an avenue into discussing the show’s evolution and the incompatibility of the show’s narrative approach with the reality of our Peak TV moment.
For context, I didn’t watch most of the second season of Westworld, and none of the third, and so walking into the end of the fourth season has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I know I missed a lot in that intervening period, including the introduction of Aaron Paul’s Caleb, and having it explained to me was frankly insufficient for it to all make complete sense. I have completely lost the plot in terms of how the host technology works, and the impacts that it has, meaning that all of the logic of new actors playing characters and returning actors playing different versions of their past (host?) selves is more or less flying over my head.
There was a time where this was my primary issue with Westworld: the Wikipedia page for the show’s second season notes “it received criticism for its plot, which was said to be confusing,” and that more or less matches my own recollection. In 2016, the maze of Westworld entered it into conversation with a wide range of “puzzle” shows—even if the show itself only leaned into this at the end of the second season, the online content machine defined the show by its mystery, as I wrote about at the time. And what happened in the second season, at least for me, was that my patience for a puzzle show had changed in an environment where there were so many other viewing options. Westworld was content to let the mystery spiral deeper and deeper, but as it did fewer viewers followed it, to the point where the show’s two-year delay between seasons effectively siphoned off most of its viewership. Trying to understand Westworld just wasn’t compatible with the shifting attention spans of the Peak TV era, making it easier to step away from the show instead of diving deeper into its mystery.
This is, again, a theory, and obviously about 25% of the show’s early viewers remain invested in the story to this point. But what was interesting to me about returning to the show was that now that there was absolutely no chance that I would be able to understand what was going on, I found it far easier to actually enjoy watching Westworld. Freed from trying to figure out a larger mystery, I could just roll with the logic being presented, and appreciate the production design and performances that were always the primary appeal for me to begin with. The show is still as muddled from a plot perspective as it always was, but stepping away for two seasons allowed me to stop caring about that, and instead focus on the broad strokes that the show always did so well, anchored around dynamic actors who seem equally freed by the escalating absurdity to just roll with it and commit to what’s on the page.
I have no doubt that when I watch next week’s finale—which I’ll do even if I’m alone, because at this point I’m invested—I will be getting far less out of it than those of you who have watched the entire series. But even though I had access to someone for whom this was true as I watched the last two installments, I found myself not asking too many questions, filling in only the most necessary of gaps to keep from getting bogged down in the parts of the show that turned me away in the first place. It makes me wonder if this was simply a viewing position I didn’t have access to back in 2018 when Season 2 debuted. At that time, Westworld was facing the expectations set by its first season, and I honestly don’t think I could have ever just said “Shrug, who cares if it makes sense?” in that moment. But after some time away and the continued deluge of content, it’s been refreshing to be able to revisit a world that I found compelling without all of the burdens that came with it, and I wonder if the same might be true for others who bailed earlier and might want to step back into HBO’s once-marquee series now that it’s finding a groove for a much smaller audience.
Episodic Observations: Westworld Season 4
I was struck by the realization that Aaron Paul has really struggled to find a followup role to Breaking Bad, as I really haven’t spent any time with the actor until dropping into his showcase episode as Caleb Groundhog Day-ed his escape to contact his daughter. He remains a compelling actor, but he’s still in search of a project to fully use his talents
I don’t know how this is for long-term viewers, but I find “death” such a hard thing to gauge in this universe. Maeve and Hale—well, Dolores in Hale’s body? I don’t even know—are both dead at the hands of the Man in Black, allegedly, but I don’t have a clear sense of whether this will stick, and there was a time where that would infuriate me. But now that I’m rolling with it, I suppose the ability for anyone—even James Marsden—to show up again is part of the appeal.
Another thing that the show’s approach to death provides is that the plot is still about more or less the same characters as it was before, despite having gone so far afield. It actually makes me wonder how sustainable this is for the fifth and final season, and how short that season will end up being given the ratings.
Consider the comments on this post as a space to discuss the season as a whole, as well as the finale on Sunday. The ratings made it hard to justify adding any kind of actual coverage, but I know there’s an appetite for discussion among subscribers, and until/unless we decide a Discord is something people would want to have, this will have to suffice.
I think BoJack Horseman was an excellent showcase for Paul's talents.
I've never stopped watching 'Westworld,' but I have realized at a certain point that it constitutes what I like to call a "bright star series."
Typically, such a show starts off with a potential premise that could last 4-5 seasons, which it burns through in 2 seasons. Consequently, its first 2 seasons are recognized as good-to-great, then the third becomes a bit of a mess. Subsequently, in Season 4, a bright star show manages to rebound and solidify its new direction. What happens after that is a bit more unpredictable.
Shows that follow this schema include 'Homeland,' 'Dexter,' 'Nip/Tuck,' and 'Arrow,' all of which exhausted their premises way too quickly. Good-to-great S1 and S2, a messy S3, then a rebound S4. Based on this, I more or less knew that S4 of 'Westworld' would be better than S3 and I tweeted about this back in June.
Anyway, it's nice to see that the show is indeed having a qualitative and critical resurgence. I thought S2 was actually the show operating at the very peak of its powers with confident 'I don't care what you think' storytelling resulting in stellar hour after stellar hour. S3 was messy but underrated. Indeed, it was probably still the best S3 out of the five bright star programs mentioned here. The parts that worked worked extremely well and it had a pretty good finale.