The first season of the American science fiction western television series Westworld, subtitled The Maze, premiered on HBO on October 2, 2016, and concluded on December 4, 2016, consisting of ten episodes. The television series was created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and it is based on the 1973 film of the same name, written and directed by Michael Crichton. The first season stars an ensemble cast led by Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright, James Marsden, Ed Harris, and Anthony Hopkins. The first season received critical acclaim, with particular praise for the visuals, story, and performances. The series received seven nominations at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards, including for Outstanding Drama Series; however, the series did not win in any category.
Plot summary Westworld's co-founder Robert Ford implements a change in the hosts' programming ostensibly as part of a new narrative for the park, but meant to encourage the park's oldest operating host, Dolores Abernathy, to find the proverbial "center of the maze", which represents the ability to achieve sentience. Host sentience was the goal of deceased co-founder Arnold Weber and later, Ford himself. Other hosts are affected by this change, creating confusion among the park staff and guests, and leading the Delos board to doubt Ford's ability to run the park. Dolores does ultimately gain sentience, and at a celebration within the park attended by Delos's board members, Ford announces his new narrative: a revolt by the hosts against the human staff and park guests, which starts with Dolores killing Ford and slaughtering many of the panicked party guests.
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Production Jerry Weintraub had been pushing for a remake for years and, after his success with HBO's Behind the Candelabra, he convinced the network to greenlight a pilot. He took the project to Jonathan Nolan and co-writer Lisa Joy, who saw the potential in the concept to make something far more ambitious, and on August 31, 2013, it was announced that premium cable channel HBO had ordered a pilot for a potential television series version of the story, with Nolan, Joy, J. J. Abrams, Jerry Weintraub and Bryan Burk as executive producers. HBO later announced that Westworld had been taken to series and that it would premiere in 2015. On August 9, 2015, HBO released the first teaser, which revealed it would premiere in 2016. The ten episode first season was reportedly produced on a budget of approximately $100 million, with per-episode budgets somewhere between $8 million to $10 million, and the pilot episode alone costing $25 million to produce. HBO and Warner Bros. Television shared the cost of producing the series; HBO reportedly also paid an undisclosed licensing fee to Warner Bros. Television for broadcast rights.
Casting Casting for the series was initiated on July 22, 2014, with Anthony Hopkins and Evan Rachel Wood the first to board the series in the roles of Ford and Dolores respectively. August 6 saw the additions of Jeffrey Wright, Rodrigo Santoro, Shannon Woodward, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Angela Sarafyan, Simon Quarterman, James Marsden, Ed Harris and Thandiwe Newton to the main cast. Eddie Rouse, who appears in a guest appearance as Kissy, died on December 8, 2014, and Miranda Otto, who was cast in the role of Virginia Pittman, was announced to have exited the series in July 2015 after the character was repurposed and was replaced with Sidse Babett Knudsen. Additionally, Clifton Collins, Jr., Eion Bailey and Jimmi Simpson were announced as having joined the cast. Bailey exited his role a week later, and Ben Barnes was signed to replace him. Tessa Thompson joined on September 18.
Filming Filming for the show's pilot episode took place during a 22-day period starting on August 29, 2014 in and around Los Angeles as well as Moab, Utah. Filming locations in California included various soundstages, backlots at both Universal Studios and Warner Bros., the Paramount Ranch in Agoura, the Melody Ranch in Santa Clarita, the Skirball Cultural Center and the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, and the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. The Melody Ranch set used for the town of Sweetwater had been used previously for many western films, such as Django Unchained and The Magnificent Seven, but was significantly upgraded for Westworld by production designer Zack Grobler to portray an idealized version of the American frontier. Green screens were placed around the California sets to block modern objects like parking lots, so that the California shots could be later merged digitally with exterior shots from Utah. For scenes showing the arrival of guests, the filmmakers were able to arrange with the Fillmore and Western Railway for the use of a small train originally built for the 2013 film The Lone Ranger. F&W also provided a few hundred feet of track on which to place the train; then a pusher vehicle was used to propel the train into the Sweetwater set. The scenes in the underground laboratory levels of Westworld's operations center were filmed on a soundstage at Melody Ranch. The lab set used glass walls extensively, which meant the crew had to be vigilant to avoid walking through glass on the rather dark set, and they had to keep identifying and suppressing unwanted reflections. Hawthorne Plaza was used for filming the "cold storage" level where decommissioned hosts are stored. Production was temporarily halted for a couple of months in early 2016 so that showrunners Nolan and Joy could complete the scripts for the last four episodes of the first season. The climax of the first season's finale was filmed at Paramount Ranch in April 2016, with approximately 300 people on set. The crew spent ten days in May striking the set, which included having to modify structures installed by the filmmakers, such as the chapel, so that "HBO's intellectual property [would not be] violated".
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