CANCELED in 2022: Westworld and 14 other genre shows we’ll miss

If you’re a fan of sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, and anything else generally nerdy, 2022 was a great year for TV. Between House of the Dragon, Star Wars: Andor, The Sandman and much more, our cups runneth over.

But not every show was so lucky. A lot of series met their ends this past year, some of them before they’d gotten a second season and others right as they were reaching the finish line. In this post, we take a moment to commemorate them, and maybe, in a couple of rare cases, hold out hope for more.

Westworld

The biggest shock cancellation of the year was Westworld. There was a time when this heady sci-fi drama was one of the jewels in HBO’s crown. For that first season, it had people glued to their screens. Who was a host and who a human? What was the meaning of the Maze? What is the nature of consciousness? Westworld was asking big questions and doing it with style, with plenty of violent delights and violent ends included for the masses.

But with each subsequent season, the show got a little more boring, a little more confusing, and a little easier to ignore. By the time season 4 rolled around, most of the that original audience was gone. HBO put almost no marketing behind the thing, and the new episodes came and went with a fizzle.

That said, the show was still a high-quality production — season 4 was an improvement on season 3, even if fewer people watched — and the ending clearly set up one final lap. So for HBO to pull the plug was still a shock.

There’s a good chance the choice to end Westworld was made by the new regime ushered in by new Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who will reappear on this list later. So goodbye, Westworld: you were the best of shows, you were the meh of shows, and now you’ve been pulled off HBO Max to be aired on FAST streaming channels. An ignoble death and ignoble burial.