Westworld X: Reloaded for Fourth Season

[DMC]

9 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

My saddest cancellations were Canivale and Penny Dreadful. 

Penny Dreadful went out on its own terms.  Logan is on record many times saying that was the natural end of Vanessa's story.  I suppose they could've kept it going without her, but, who cares?

10 hours ago, karaddin said:

I can't imagine there's many of us, but I'll toast to that. I loved it. I haven't rewatched because I'll just get annoyed again, but I should do so anyway.

9 hours ago, sifth said:

Hey, I really enjoyed that show as well. I thought I was the only one.

TSCC lovers of the world unite!!! 

[Spockydog]

Carnivale could have been a great show. If anything ever happened in it.

 

[karaddin]

Still was great as far as I'm concerned, I loved it too.

As for Nolan and Joy as writers - I'm so fucking over "being an incompetent hack" as the default response to something not working for you. In the case of this show I think portions of the audience figuring out the twist for season 1 really got in their head and hurt subsequent seasons, but that doesn't make them hacks. 

And ignoring this series, there's some fantastic writing in Person of Interest.

[Corvinus85]

Expected, but still disappointing. I almost wish they would have cancelled it after the previous season, which had a more optimistic ending than what we got this time around.

[sifth]

38 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Still was great as far as I'm concerned, I loved it too.

As for Nolan and Joy as writers - I'm so fucking over "being an incompetent hack" as the default response to something not working for you. In the case of this show I think portions of the audience figuring out the twist for season 1 really got in their head and hurt subsequent seasons, but that doesn't make them hacks. 

And ignoring this series, there's some fantastic writing in Person of Interest.

One portion of their writing that I found particularly horrible, were the Dolores clones. She would just place a black orb into a new host body and the “clone” would simply act like the human version of the character returning to the story. The clones in no way acted like Dolores, despite being clones of her mind in new bodies. To say it was lazy writing, just to keep certain actors on the show, would be an understatement.

Also I agree; Person of Interest was very good.

[DMC]

41 minutes ago, karaddin said:

As for Nolan and Joy as writers - I'm so fucking over "being an incompetent hack" as the default response to something not working for you.

Have you met the internet?  Everybody commenting on shows is so obviously better than the people being paid to and actually writing it.  I think my favorite right now may be the Tolkien nerds that think if only it would have been sooo much better to a broad audience.

45 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Expected, but still disappointing. I almost wish they would have cancelled it after the previous season, which had a more optimistic ending than what we got this time around.

Yeah, season 3's ending was basically Fight Club, that would've been cool.  Like I said, ending Maeve and Bernard's stories where they're at is the most disappointing part of this.  To use a TSCC comparison, they were unceremoniously offed like BAG was in the penultimate episode.

[karaddin]

On 11/6/2022 at 12:45 PM, DMC said:

Have you met the internet?  Everybody commenting on shows is so obviously better than the people being paid to and actually writing it.  I think my favorite right now may be the Tolkien nerds that think if only it would have been sooo much better to a broad audience.

Yes, yes I have lol. Maybe I'm just getting grumpy because I've spent too long with the internet. So naturally I then went and read Civilization fans spout a bunch of ideas that would either kill the franchise, or just be remaking older versions of the game for no reason, as the obvious things the developers are just too dumb and lazy to do. Hey, look at this game that tried to do something in the Civ space which had some good ideas but totally failed to capture a player base, Civ should do exactly what it did and it will save the franchise! We definitely wouldn't complain about lazy developers copying someone else if they did that.

It's really no surprise I'm making myself grumpy lol.

@sifthAgreed on the clones not working at all. No issues with criticizing specific parts of the writing, I just get my back up when it jumps across to judging the people rather than their work. Especially when there's clear examples of things that did work as well, you don't get creative art by sticking to a safe and guaranteed formula and sometimes it's going to miss.

[Myrddin]

Should I change the thread title to: Westworld: Unloaded for Fifth Season?

 

I finally watched season 4 and thought it was a vast improvement on season 3 (still not sold on Jesse becoming such a main character when there were so many rich existing characters). But I'm ok with it not proceeding. The story was becoming untenable.  

[Ran]

To add insult to injury following cancellation, Westworld is being pulled from HBO Max. Speculation out there is that it may headline a new free ad-supported streaming service that seems to have become a fad among the streamers (like Amazon's Freevee), or get shopped around to some other networks or something.

What a way to go for a show that had been one of HBO's big prestige tentpoles.

[Drogon’s Flight]

Complete disrespect from Zaslav. What a way to treat the creatives who worked on it and the HBO audience. I hope it goes to Amazon.

[DMC]

22 minutes ago, Ran said:

To add insult to injury following cancellation, Westworld is being pulled from HBO Max. Speculation out there is that it may headline a new free ad-supported streaming service that seems to have become a fad among the streamers (like Amazon's Freevee), or get shopped around to some other networks or something.

That's really fucked up.  One of the main reasons I keep HBO Max is out of the natural assumption they, ya know, have all their own shows.  Can't help but think it's a bad decision on their end to fuck with that.

[Cas Stark]

10 hours ago, DMC said:

That's really fucked up.  One of the main reasons I keep HBO Max is out of the natural assumption they, ya know, have all their own shows.  Can't help but think it's a bad decision on their end to fuck with that.

Yeah, but I suspect that the HBO we have known since the 90s...producing top tier original content/hands off approach to creatives...is going the way of the dodo bird with these last mergers/acquisitions/whatever.  

It's funny how everything ultimately reverts to the baseline....streaming is soon going to be, if it isn't already, just like network TV, full of dross and tacky ads.

[Kalbear]

That really does signal the end of a golden age of TV, then. HBO was the original home of content over ratings being king, and continued for a long time to embody that. Somewhat ironic to me that it is likely Game of Thrones that signals the peak and the end of that line given how absurdly successful spectacle TV became. 

[karaddin]

Streaming services are shooting themselves in the foot, hopefully we all learn the lesson that we can't trust any of them to keep art available and the only way to truly have it is to have a copy you have possession of. This license to access/use a thing is an exploitative dead end.

[Myrddin]

@karaddin Exactly. It's like media corporations have adopted the updated adage "Access to knowledge is power" as their business plan.

Whenever I buy any media, I always buy a physical copy that includes digital, not just digital. I tend to fire up Vudu more than go hunt the DVD/Bluray, but I still have them in my bookcase.

These last few years, I've all but stopped buying any media, instead just assuming studios would continue to host their own content on their studio services. Discovery has proved how stable that is. 

 

[Corvinus85]

I don't own many shows or movies in a physical copy anymore, but I bought digital copies on Amazon for stuff I really like because of the reason that a streaming service could pull something at any time.

[Fragile Bird]

This thread has alerted me to the crap going on with HBO. Every story about it leaps out now. What a sad turn of events.

I was in a record store this summer buying CDs of some music I love and I was telling the store clerk that most of my friends laugh at me for buying CDs instead of just listening to Spotify. His pov, of course, was that you want to own the CDs so no one can take them away from you.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

This thread has alerted me to the crap going on with HBO. Every story about it leaps out now. What a sad turn of events.

This post has alerted me to the fact that I'm not going to be able to send you a Christmas gift on time. But I will send you something in the not too distant future. Honestly if I could send you a hilariously oversized duck you win from a carny I'd do just that! With love, of course.

[karaddin]

8 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I don't own many shows or movies in a physical copy anymore, but I bought digital copies on Amazon for stuff I really like because of the reason that a streaming service could pull something at any time.

As in a digital version you can download, or just access through the prime video portal? Because I'm not trusting the latter any more, they'll assert that they sold you the right to access it through their portal but that only lasts as long as its on the portal/the portal exists.

[Ran]

The reporting from Vulture suggests that this removal of a few shows is not something that'll happen again after the New Year, because it's due to special circumstances related to the merger between Discovery and Warner Bros., and has only a narrow window where they can take these writedowns:

Quote

On the other hand, a source tells me the major cause of the increasingly shrinking HBO Max library — the post-merger restructuring rules — will no longer be an issue in 2023. Those special rules made the 2022 purge possible and won’t apply in the New Year. As a result, any shows that get removed going forward will save WBD much less money, and while Zaslav has never met a budget cut he didn’t love, it seems less likely we’ll see as many — or even any — dramatic catalogue cleansings in 2023.

Although they add the caveat that if WBD them sells itself to someone else, like Comcast or Apple, they too may take a round of content cuts...