HBO’s Westworld isn’t the first adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel about an Old West-themed resort in the future where guests sleep with robot prostitutes, duel with robot gunmen, and drink with robot bartenders. However, it has arguably gone much deeper into the premise of the novel than those previous adaptations – and the novel itself, for that matter – and it has a large cast of complex, colorful, beautifully drawn characters.
RELATED: Westworld Showrunners Promise Season 3 Will Be a “Radical Shift”
Unfortunately, producing a show with this sort of philosophical weight isn’t easy, so the show has long breaks between seasons. In the meantime, then, here are 10 Shows To Watch If You Like Westworld.
Deadwood
Often included on lists of shows that were canceled too soon, Deadwood was HBO’s first attempt at bringing the western genre to profanity-laden premium cable. The premise of Westworld is more postmodern than that of Deadwood in that it is not a depiction of the Old West, but rather a depiction of our fantasies of what the Old West was like that we’ve gotten from Hollywood’s previous depictions of it.
However, Deadwood has enough of the same elements to keep Westworld fans intrigued: it’s a western series on HBO containing lots of sex, swearing, and violence. Suffice to say, Westworld fans will be satisfied.
Humans
This joint production between the UK’s Channel 4 and AMC blurs the line between human and machine in a world inhabited by advanced robots, just like Westworld. Another similarity is the familiar faces in the cast: the MCU’s William Hurt, The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson, The Matrix’s Carrie-Anne Moss, and The Day Today’s Rebecca Front all make appearances.
The show has, so far, released three seasons and there are no current plans for a fourth, so now is the time to jump in and catch up. And they’re nice, short seasons of just eight episodes each, so binge-watching them is a breeze. You could even do it on a weekend.
Black Mirror
Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror is a dark anthology series that tells trippy cautionary tales about the dangerous side of technology. While Westworld isn’t an anthology series itself, its plot is doled out around the idea of world-building. The show creates a world and tells you the stories of the characters that inhabit it.
RELATED: Times Black Mirror Went Too Far
This is similar to Black Mirror, which has a rigid anthology format, but is set in an interconnected universe linked by plot elements that carry across from episode to episode. The cast of Black Mirror is as refreshingly diverse as that of Westworld, while stereotypes and established tropes are similarly subverted.
Game of Thrones
Westworld was actually initially developed to replace Game of Thrones as HBO’s flagship epic genre series after it aired its final season. While it might not have become quite as popular or highly rated, it does have the same interesting ensemble cast of characters, complex long-running story arcs, and sense of the theatrical.
RELATED: Game Of Thrones: 5 Things The Books Do Better (And 5 The Show Does Better)
Every episode of Westworld feels more like a movie than an episode of television, and the same easily goes for Game of Thrones. In fact, most of the episodes in the series’ upcoming final season will reportedly be feature-length, so they literally will feel like a movie.
The Handmaid’s Tale
This Hulu original gem is another bleak show that has been using its future setting and exaggerated reality and plot devices to hold a mirror up to our own society. The Handmaid’s Tale is undeniably the more socially relevant of the two shows, but the two shows share the same spirit of exposing the dark side of humanity through addictive drama.
The writing and directing in this show are fantastic, while the whole plot is anchored by an unsurprisingly incredible performance from Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, who was crowned “The Queen of Peak TV” by Vulture. The series is a staggering achievement.
Orphan Black
Orphan Black is a similarly existential and psychologically tasking show to Westworld, as we’re forced to question who people really are and what it means to be human. This is a show all about doppelgangers, in which sense it’s almost Dostoyevskian. You have to take everything in the show with a pinch of salt, because it likes to pull the rug out from under its audience.
RELATED: Snowpiercer TV Show Adds Orphan Black Co-Creator As New Showrunner
We’re used to this in Westworld, a show that insinuated William and the Man in Black were two separate people for pretty much the entire first season before the mind-boggling twist that they were the same guy.
The Leftovers
The Leftovers is another HBO drama with a larger-than-life premise that manages to feel as small as real life by focusing on the people and their place in this world rather than the wider world itself. Westworld takes something crazy like a Wild West theme park filled with robots and makes it feel real and identifiable, because of its commitment to the reality of the show.
The same goes for The Leftovers, which creates a believable and honest reality out of a post-apocalyptic world in which 2% of the Earth’s population has mysteriously disappeared with no explanation from science or religion.
Altered Carbon
Netflix’s Altered Carbon another epic science fiction series about a bunch of scientists who decide to play God and the people affected by it. The series’ first season starring Joel Kinnaman is reported to have had a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones put together, which resulted in some beautiful cyberpunk visuals.
Few series on the air today – a small handful that includes Westworld itself – have photography that is as fiercely cinematic as that in Altered Carbon. The show’s second season, with Anthony Mackie replacing Kinnaman as the lead, is set to premiere later this year.
True Detective
Fans of one HBO drama will generally enjoy the other HBO dramas, as we’ve seen from some of the other entries on this list. There are a lot of comparisons that can be drawn between the convoluted and layered storytelling of Westworld and that of True Detective, which is currently airing its third season starring Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali.
RELATED: True Detective Theory: Season 1 Crossover Reveals Season 3’s Ending
The similarities are especially prevalent in the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s anthology crime series, which saw the show tell an epic, sweeping story across two separate timelines and balance them beautifully – Westworld did this without even telling us (at least initially).
Mr. Robot
Just like Westworld, USA’s hacker drama series Mr. Robot is filled with intriguing setups followed by jaw-dropping plot twists. It also has the former’s genre thrills and gorgeous cinematography without losing sight of the characters at the root of it all.
The characters and visual style of the show were heavily inspired by the satirical anarchist cinema of the ‘90s – Fight Club, American Psycho etc. – so while the show takes inspiration from a different era and genre of cinema, it has the same genetic makeup as a TV series that takes cues from the movies in order to create a long-form cinematic experience.
