Lavish production budget makes Westworld go round
The Show: Westworld, Season 1, Episode 10 The Moment: The escape
Maeve (Thandie Newton), a robotic madam, seems to have achieved human consciousness. Now she’s busting out of the eerily lifelike Westworld theme park, along with human scientist Felix (Leonardo Nam) and two gunslinger robots, Armistice (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) and Hector (Rodrigo Santoro). They ride an elevator down to the lab. They traverse a hallway of glass-walled rooms; in them, robots learn to gamble, bathe, have sex. Suddenly, an army of security guards fires at them.
Armistice and Hector duck into a storage room, where scores of naked robots stand. They slit a guard’s throat. Armistice grabs his gun. Chortling at its power, she offs several guards.
The foursome barge into a powergenerating room, then into another lab. In here, however, the robots are Samurai practising swordplay. “What is this place?” Maeve asks. “It’s complicated,” Felix answers. It sure is. Wednesday I wrote about The Crown’s pricey production values. Westworld’s budget makes The Crown’s look spare. In this single sequence, there are multiple sets, hundreds of precisely costumed extras, elaborate stunts and CGI. Yet this isn’t an exception — every sequence is like this.
Here’s the true marker of HBO’s financial commitment, though: The network allowed series creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan to shut down production in the middle of Season 1 so they could craft a richer story. And they won’t air Season 2 until 2018, because Joy and Nolan need a year to write.
Extras, costumes, sets, CGI — all are costly. But in TV, the most lavish luxury — and the most rewarding — is time. Westworld is available on hbocanada.com and TMN GO. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.