The comparisons between Westworld and Game of Thrones started early. Over a month before Westworld debuted, Vulture asked if the show would be a “Game of Thrones-style hit.” Not a day after the series premiere, Wired wondered if it could “do for science fiction what Game of Thrones did for fantasy,” and ratings between the two series were thoroughly compared and contrasted.
The comparisons were to be expected. After all, the two shows share some of the same DNA. They’re both on HBO, they both cast top-notch talent in key Season 1 roles (Sean Bean in Game of Thrones and Anthony Hopkins on Westworld), and they each employ Ramin Djwadi as a composer. They also both require a lot of resources. These shows aren’t Curb Your Enthusiasm or Girls or even The Sopranos—they’re lavish, fantastical productions set in invented worlds, and to pull them off, HBO had to invest in elaborate costumes, sets, and special effects. Of course they were going to be compared.
Westworld Season 1 wrapped up a couple weeks ago. Now that the dust has settled, we can look back at those comparisons with some perspective, and consider whether Westworld really does have a chance of replacing Game of Thrones as HBO’s tentpole drama.
The numbers are on its side. Although Westworld’s ratings have a long ways to go before they catch up to where Thrones’ are now, Deadline reports that ratings for Westworld Season 1 outstripped those for Game of Thrones Season 1. In fact, with an average of 12 million viewers across all platforms per episode, Westworld Season 1 has become the most-watched debut season of any HBO original show in history.
That’s made executives at HBO parent company Warner Bros. very happy. “I am really, really excited about the opportunity that we potentially have with ‘Westworld,'” CEO Kevin Tsujihara said at the Credit Suisse Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Phoenix. “If you look at the viewer data on ‘Westworld,’ its first year viewing on all platforms is greater than ‘Game of Thrones.'”
This is happening at a good time for HBO. Game of Thrones will end after two more truncated seasons, and talk of a spinoff remains vague. Vinyl, the network’s splashy drama about the rock and roll scene in the ’70s, didn’t find an audience, and True Detective Season 2 fizzled. The network needed something to fill the void, and Westworld came made-to-order.
If the network plays its cards right, Westworld could last it a while, too. Like Game of Thrones, the world of the series is vast, and there are many corners yet to be explored. In the first season, we’re confined to the titular Westworld, a vast, real-life theme park modeled after the Old West. But there are presumably other worlds in the area (possibly a samurai world), and filling out the details of those could make for several seasons of interesting TV.
But there are caveats. For one thing, Tsujihara’s talk about viewing numbers “on all platforms” doesn’t take into account that, when Game of Thrones debuted in 2011, there were fewer platforms to choose from. HBO Go, the company’s streaming service, was only a year old. HBO Now, its standalone platform, was years away. Who’s to say how much better Game of Thrones Season 1 would have done had those options been more widely available back then? There’s also the potential of a sophomore slump. Westworld is based on one 1973 movie, not an ongoing series of incredibly dense novels. Without a guide, can creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy keep the show’s many threads together long enough for the show to reach a satisfying ending years in the future? If HBO wants Westworld to be a success on par with Game of Thrones, they’ll have to.
That’s something else Game of Thrones has done for the network, for better or worse. It wasn’t that long ago that HBO was subsisting on dynamic, original TV that was nonetheless relatively cheap to produce, like Sex and the City, Six Feet Under and Oz. Game of Thrones changed things. Now, any HBO tentpole drama that doesn’t reach its lofty highs risks being deemed a failure. HBO created a monster, and now they have to feed it.
We’ll get more answers to these questions when Westworld Season 2 debuts in 2018, also the year of Game of Thrones’ final season. Hopefully, it’ll be the passing of the baton HBO wants it to be.