Westworld (2016 Fall Schedule - HBO Premium Series)

[Borak]

I figured it would be a good show. Jonathan Nolan with an HBO budget and no network restrictions? Hell yeah.

This is the guy that tricked CBS into thinking they were getting a regular cop show with Person of Interest. Sure, a lot of the early episodes were self-contained bad-guy-of-the-week episodes, but he laid the seeds for what became a science-fiction show with a central arc of emerging sentient AIs and their conflict with each other, while touching on topics such as the debate between deontological vs. utilitarian codes of ethics and The Great Filter by way of Fermi's Paradox, among other things.

The cool part is, that Person of Interest never used the old trope of mentioning a scientific term, having a character say 'English please', and then explaining the term. He trusted that the audience was intelligent enough to figure things out, and didn't dumb things down for the audience. This has continued into Westworld.

(For those that watched a few early episodes of PoI and got bored, check out S02E21 and S02E22 - the final two episodes of Season 2 - where it becomes apparent to everyone in the main cast that Finch's Machine is actually alive.)

So yeah, Jonathan Nolan actually getting to tell the story he wants to tell with a higher budget can only be a good thing.