“Westworld” just concluded its third season, the once acclaimed series has stumbled a bit in its most recent season both with critics and audiences as its numbers – though still good by HBO standards – have dropped off this season even as other shows are surging in this period of self-isolation.
The premium cabler recently gave the fourth season a green light and at the time there were rumors showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy had a six season plan overall. Speaking with Variety this week, Nolan shot down that talk saying even they have no clue as to how many seasons they want to do because things can change:
“Lisa and I have never actually talked about a number of seasons. [T]here’s been reporting about deals and other stuff like that. But we’ve never actually talked out loud about how many seasons we imagine this thing going, because I think you’d be foolish to. Things change, circumstances change.
I think when we sat down to do the show, we didn’t quite realize how difficult it would be to make this show — [laughing] how many years it would take per season. So we’ve never actually talked about how many seasons that plan was, and indeed I think when we had the plan it didn’t actually map out to a specific number of seasons, exactly. It was a beginning, a middle and an end.
When you have a show going like this, you want to stay as long as you’re telling a compelling story. We’re heading towards that end, but we haven’t completely mapped it out. At this point, part of the work is looking at the rest of the story we have to tell.”
The third season finale was down 18% on the second season finale, drawing 1.8 million total viewers across all of HBO’s platforms on Sunday. That’s better than the third season premiere which was down a major 57% from last season. Even so, the new season launch fared better than the starts of both “The Outsider” and “Watchmen”.
