Westworld Has Entered the New, Better Frontier of Sci-Fi

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. When it premiered six years ago, Westworld epitomized prestige sci-fi at its peak. An expensive HBO series with an old-school Michael Crichton pedigree, it featured a stellar cast and a mind-trippy premise: What if all the sentient robots, or "hosts," at a Western theme park decided they'd had enough of being kicked and dragged around? Subsequent seasons revealed the influence of artificial intelligence and reached far beyond the borders of the Westworld attraction, a global mess of money, corruption, and consciousness-tampering that was nightmare fuel for viewers watching at home while scrolling through Twitter. It was a hit--even if a modest one.