In this week’s newsletter: Happy 20th birthday to the forum that reshaped fandom and is one of the internet’s most eccentric collaborative spaces
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t only ended a few years ago, but Westworld already feels a bit of a TV footnote. A pricey mid-2010s remake of a 70s Yul Brynner movie few people remembered, HBO’s robot cowboy drama lumbered on for four lukewarm seasons before getting cancelled – with few people really noticing.
Still, when it premiered, Westworld was big news. Here was a show well-placed to do a Game of Thrones, only for sci-fi. Its high production values were married to an eye-catching cast (Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris, Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright) and it was run by the crack team of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who promised they had a playbook for how the whole show would shake out. This, of course, was an important promise in that immediate post-Lost period, where everyone was terrified that they would be strung along by a show that was “making it up as they went along” (as a Lost defender, I have to say at this point that they weren’t “making it up as they went along”, but that’s an argument for another newsletter).
But even the best laid plans, and the most tightly plotted of TV shows, have a way of unravelling. The first inkling I had that Westworld might not be TV’s next big series was when fans of the show on forum/social media hybrid Reddit started correctly guessing how plotlines would pan out. Twist after twist in the show’s first season were predicted, sometimes a week early or more, by Redditors well-versed in the rhythms and tropes of telly, or otherwise just willing to go above and beyond in the search for the most minuscule of clues. Things got so bad that, in the second season, Joy and Nolan were forced to rewrite the script to alter a plotline the Redditors had already rumbled. It was a sign not just of Westworld’s fragility, but the strength of Reddit and its users, who were able to make even seasoned showrunners quake in their boots.
