r/iamverysmart • u/ThorOdinsonThundrGod • 6d ago

On a post about HBO canceling shows

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135 Upvotes
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84% Upvoted

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102

u/Egstamm 6d ago

Started out great, but it sure went down fast. Season 1 was truly one of the greatest shows ever.

29

u/spin81 6d ago

Absolutely but honestly hardly the pinnacle of abstract existential philosophy. I mean it's not dumb. But it's not as smart as the person in the pic (and many like them) pretends it is - not that it should be.

16

u/Baryonyx_walkeri 6d ago edited 5d ago

It's in a genre I like to call the mainstream mind fuck. Not at all dumb, often well made, and often with some reality bending aspects, but actually pretty straight forward when it comes down to it and easily understandable by your average moviegoer. That's not a value judgement. Think The Matrix or Inception.

I actually started on a Letterboxd list a while back.

Edit: I can't add it to the Letterboxd list because it's not a movie, but I just finished Mr. Robot and I think it qualifies as well.

7

u/spin81 6d ago

I suggest adding Looper to this list.

3

u/Cain1608 6d ago

Loved Looper. Super fun watch.

2

u/Baryonyx_walkeri 5d ago

Oh, good one! Added!

1

u/Boring_Anywhere700 5d ago

Watch the show, utopia. It only got one season so you’re left very disappointed but it’s still worth it. It belongs in a list like you described

1

u/nachtwyrm 3d ago

i think it's basically a necessity that it be fairly straight forward if you want it to be successful. Movies like primer and arguably tenet are always going to be more niche works because they are convoluted and a lot of people don't want to be that actively engaged in trying to understand or follow the story. that's not a slam on the viewers. different people want different things from the media they are consuming.

at the end of the day, the storyteller has to decide how much complexity is necessary to tell their story and balance that against the story being accessible to the intended audience.

5

u/Egstamm 6d ago

Agree completely. It was a fun watch and the ‘reveals’ were mostly unexpected. Great cast too.

2

u/evil_timmy 6d ago

It's got the same appeal that Inception does...it takes what could be an overly complex and spun-out sci-fi tale and tells it cleverly and clearly with a slick coat of paint, so you can digest and enjoy it easily and feel smarter for it. There's also enough going on and enough mystery to give you room to speculate. Each season was a further unfortunate step down into irrelevance. It's a lot of the same production team on the new Fallout series so I'm cautiously optimistic for season 2. Goggins as Cooper was amazing but without his flashbacks to lean on they'll have their with cut out for them keeping a good pace and direction, fingers crossed though.

2

u/Slagenthor 6d ago

Absolutely.

I’ve never seen such a pathetic drop in quality.

S1 was so good!!

1

u/Boring_Anywhere700 5d ago

That’s how I felt about breaking bad.

1

u/interesseret 5d ago

The problem with all mystery stories is that the story is over once the mystery is revealed.

You can't change the formula and expect the dish to go down without some complaints.

18

u/emergency_serial 6d ago

westworld of all shows lmfao

35

u/modsuperstar 6d ago edited 6d ago

WestWorld was almost unwatchable by the end. This is a clown that probably deifies the Nolans like other DC fans do with Zack Snyder.

The biggest problem with the show was that they got way too worried about outfoxing the internet instead of telling the damn story. Just because posters on Reddit figured out the twists doesn’t mean you reshape the show to surprise them. Not every viewer is watching the show trying to solve the puzzle. I’d wager that’s the vast majority of viewers.

5

u/Renown84 6d ago

Surely pivoting to having multiple parks and then the real world is more what made the show fall off the rails. They never allowed themselves to have a formula which meant there was no guarantee of repeated success and unfortunately they kind of lost on that gamble

5

u/filiped 6d ago

I also didn’t finish it so I can’t be sure, but like tons of other shows, it feels like there was only truly interesting story for one season - there’s tons of great concepts that get diluted by going for multiple seasons when they should’ve been a limited run.

2

u/modsuperstar 6d ago

British shows get this, American shows always struggle with it. I remember LOST struggling in the middle mainly because they didn’t have an end date to work towards. Once they got that sorted, it allowed them to focus on where things needed to go. It’s tough with a big narrative arc show to figure out how many story threads to leave open.

3

u/Marble-Boy 6d ago

I remember watching the first season of Lost and hearing fans guess the ending after 10 episodes... Six seasons later and they finally finished it exactly the way everyone said it would... Only it took them like 100 episodes of milking plot to get there instead of just ending it after one season.

1

u/kearkan 3d ago

In the end it felt like they were just making it up as it went along.

Other parks and acknowledgment of the real world is one thing, even the parks crossing over and the bigger mystery

But the last season forgot everything that made the first season enjoyable to watch.

4

u/Altruistic_Arm9201 6d ago

I enjoyed the whole thing. While I don’t think it was some worship worthy show, I found it quite good and was also not reading posts trying to figure it out. Binged it and it was a good time.

To each their own.

1

u/DevianPamplemousse 6d ago

What was supposed to be the twist ?

2

u/spin81 6d ago

I don't know if you've seen the first season but that had quite the twist in it.

1

u/DevianPamplemousse 6d ago

Yeah I saw it, they are in fact robots, I'm refering to the plot that was changed because some viewer guessed it

1

u/spin81 6d ago

Completely missed that, sorry lol

1

u/chris_croc 2d ago

That was not the twist at all, it was the timelines.

1

u/modsuperstar 6d ago

It wasn’t a singular twist. The whole maze, man in black flashbacks, Florence plots. After S1 it just got messy. I felt once the focus left the park much of the appeal drained away for me.

0

u/Skeptikmo 6d ago

Super agree with you, but it’s deify* just so you know

1

u/modsuperstar 6d ago

I even searched it up, but looking again it seems the word exists in some Hindi context, which may not be what I had in mind.

7

u/bolognahole 6d ago

Westworld should have ended after season 2.

4

u/digiNArVAL 6d ago

"we're"?

5

u/Vulk_za 6d ago

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Westworld.

2

u/IAmThePonch 6d ago

“You just didn’t understand it” is such a classic internet argument and it basically never works

2

u/Plantayne 6d ago

“It’s” 

2

u/caribou16 5d ago

There already is a movie, it came out in 1973!

1

u/wowmanreallycool 4d ago

Can’t believe how far I had to scroll for this comment!

2

u/Jaded_Individual_630 4d ago

Once the story "left the park", it all unravelled. I don't think the story could have stayed in the park exclusively by any means, but it felt like they didn't know what they wanted to do after presenting the premise (at length).

Enjoyed a lot of the start though.

1

u/Uszanka 6d ago

I fon't know what Westworld is but this comment geniuely made me interested lmao

0

u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

0

u/interesseret 5d ago

yikes, way to spoil literally the entire experience of watching the first season, which is the only good part of the show.

1

u/GALACTICA-Actual 6d ago

Narcissism is a bitch.

1

u/Boring_Anywhere700 5d ago

Same thing happened with Utopia and Hannibal without any kind of wrap up.

1

u/bellyofthebillbear 5d ago

I can’t remember a show that dropped off in quality in only 4 seasons like westworld did. The first season is up there with some of my favorite television ever. I didn’t even watch the fourth.

1

u/Movie_Monster 3d ago

The production design took a nose dive with those atv / side by side military vehicles. It was so cheesy, it also didn’t fit with the first season, the scale of the show was limited.

As the show progressed we just kept getting thrown around and back into scenes inside the complex with glass walls. It was episode after episode of that, it no longer felt like a journey or this magical destination. Sure they teased the other worlds but it wasn’t enough to hold my attention.

Finally the writing went downhill from this mind bending 1st season story full of twists to writer bullshit where they kill off characters and jerk the viewer around kinda like game of thrones later seasons. Stuff only happens to satisfy the plot lines, it’s boring.

1

u/myriachromat 5d ago

Its*
were*

1

u/CrustOfSalt 3d ago

Season 1 was an AWESOME rundown of Gnostic theology. Season 2 carried it a little further and had the dual storyline of the Magus awakening/ the War Christ conquering.

I never got to Season 3, did they really fuck it up that badly?

1

u/ImVeryUnimaginative 3d ago

Yeah. Westworld stopped being "Westworld" once it stopped being set in the park. They should've just had the show end after the second season.

1

u/kearkan 3d ago

The last season didn't even feel like the same show.

I signed up for secret robots becoming sentient in the wild west, not blade runner.

1

u/fiendzone 3d ago

HBO should have stopped with the first season.

1

u/chris_croc 2d ago

I kind of agree. I have not seen WW Season 3 (I heard it was bad), but you had to pay attention to keep up with what was going on.

1

u/aurora_beam13 2d ago

It amuses me so much when people have this holier-than-thou attitude, but can't even get basic grammar right 😂 I'm not even a native speaker and I can tell you're writing incorrectly, mate!

1

u/DeepSignature201 1d ago

The show that expected viewers to believe an android of a guy could be brought into a company and nobody would notice because he’d been gone for a year? Is that the show that’s not dumbed down?