At Saturday’s Television Critics Association press tour, HBO’s new president of programming Casey Bloys and Westworld executive producer Lisa Joy both faced questions about the sexualized violence against women in their upcoming TV adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film. Their answers didn’t seem to satisfy the assembled critics, particularly after they’d seen the show’s first episode, which reportedly opens with the off-screen rape of a robot played by Evan Rachel Wood. Audiences won’t have the chance to judge for themselves whether HBO has made yet another show that fetishizes violence against women until its Oct. 2 premiere date—the only footage available from the show is this month-old trailer. But if you just can’t wait to watch Westworld on TV, you’re in luck, because HBO is 26 years late to the party. For three glorious weeks in the spring of 1980, America lived, laughed, and learned with the killer androids of Westworld.
The show was called Beyond Westworld, and was a direct spinoff rather than a reboot (though, thankfully, it seems to have ignored the cloning plot in sequel Futureworld). It was developed and produced by Lou Shaw, a TV veteran whose career stretched back to Studio 57 (he was the co-creator of Quincy, M. E.). Westworld, in its half-assed way, had asked questions about the nature of consciousness and the ethics of creating, then mistreating, sentient machines. Beyond Westworld, in contrast, asked the question, “What if the robots in Westworld were killing the patrons not because they’d developed any form of self-awareness but because a deranged mad scientist was secretly controlling them?”
The correct answer, of course, is “everything interesting about the film becomes irrelevant,” but CBS’s answer was, “that same deranged scientist will use robots to try to take over the world,” and they presented that answer to the country for an hour on Wednesday nights at 8, starting March 12, 1980. In each episode, the head of security for Westworld’s Delos Corporation (Jim McMullin) and his sidekick (Connie Sellecca) must try to identify a robot hiding among humans in places as varied as a nuclear submarine and a rock band. In the promo clip above, you can see the exposition scene from the show’s first episode, which restages scenes from the film without Yul Brynner, incidentally making it very clear that the best thing about the film was always Yul Brynner.
In retrospect, CBS may have decided the show was a dud before it even aired, because it put the hourlong drama against the highly-rated Real People at NBC and Eight is Enough at ABC, a decision that Variety said guaranteed it would be “chopped into rating hamburger.” Variety was right, and CBS canceled the show after only two episodes had aired. “They apparently want instant gratification or nothing,” Shaw told the Los Angeles Times when the show was shut down. The next week, the third episode aired—as in the premiere, the robots had gained access to a nuke—and the remaining two episodes never made it to the screen until Warner Archive released the complete (five-episode) series in 2014.
It’s possible, and even likely, that HBO’s series will be better than a failed midseason replacement from 1980. But there’s one thing the first Westworld had that premium cable will never be able to duplicate: terrible commercials. So as a bonus, here are the original ads that ran with Beyond Westworld’s first episode on Cleveland, Ohio’s CBS affiliate. From Michael Jackson celebrating Disneyland’s 25th anniversary to Tony Randall selling spaghetti sauce, the ads are more star-studded than the show ever dreamed of being. It’s a reminder that the first time anyone tried to make a show about killer cowboy robots, everyone took it a lot less seriously. It wasn’t HBO, after all—it was television.
