Westworld and The Nevers being pulled from HBO Max, dumped elsewhere

Deadline reports that both Westworld and The Nevers are slated to be pulled from the HBO Max streaming service. This comes only hours after news broke that the studio was cancelling season 2 of its comedy series Minx, despite having already renewed the show long enough ago that season 2 was on the verge of wrapping production.

Unlike Minx, which is an HBO Max Original, both Westworld and The Nevers first aired on HBO proper. Westworld is perhaps the highest profile show yet to be pulled from the streaming platform amid a slew of recent cost-saving measures spearheaded by new Warner Media Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The science fiction drama has netted HBO nine Emmys since it launched in 2016.

Westworld was canceled after the conclusion of its fourth season, despite producer Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s hopes to complete their long-planned ending to the series with a fifth and final season. The Nevers, however, was in the middle of its first season after a mid-season hiatus forced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the scandal-ridden exit of creator Joss Whedon. The episodes which were already filmed were released as Season 1A in April 2021, with the cast and crew finally returning to finish filming later that year. Yet those episodes, dubbed Season 1B, have yet to be released despite having wrapped filming in December 2021.

The Nevers is effectively canceled at HBO

Deadline claims that the The Nevers season 1B has been formulated as an ending to the series, and that this move to pull the show from HBO Max signals the de facto cancellation of the show. Instead of releasing on HBO or HBO Max as was planned, it’s now reported that Season 1B will likely resurface wherever The Nevers and Westworld land after their removal from HBO Max.

“And where is that?” you might ask. We don’t have a concrete answer for that quite yet, but Deadline’s sources claim that they may become part of David Zaslav’s “plan to enter the burgeoning FAST channel space” and would be used to help launch that service. If this is your first time hearing about FAST channels, it stands for Free Ad-supported Streaming TV, and currently exists as both on-demand viewing as well as linear. If that sounds suspiciously like the streaming equivalent of cable TV to you, well…yeah, me too.

For now, all four seasons of Westworld and season 1A of The Nevers are still available on HBO Max. Watch ’em before they’re gone.

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