The Monthly Catch: Wilderpeople, Beatles, Raiders and more!

Westworld 

Speaking of television, my ears always perk up when I hear about a new HBO series. And when that series is based on a 1970s film by Michael Crichton, I find myself — a Crichton nerd as a teenager — perking up even more.

“Westworld” premiered last week to solid ratings and strong reviews, and it zoomed right up to the top of my must-watch list. The series takes Crichton’s premise — a theme park re-creation of the Old West where tourists can sleep with, fight and kill robots — and injects a modern artificial intelligence twist and moral and meta intrigue among the park’s tech staff, including its mysterious CEO (Anthony Hopkins), a programmer wanting to know why the robots are glitching and a screenwriter just wanting the ‘bots to say his lines.

The original premise of robots run amok is solid for a movie, but I wondered if it might be too slight for several seasons of a TV show. But I like where Westworld creator Johnathan Nolan and producer J.J. Abrams are spinning things, by giving the robots memories of the humans who abused them, a mysterious and sadistic Man in Black (Ed Harris) intent on “winning” the Westworld game, and the feeling that this world that lets people indulge in their basest instincts is about to spin apart. There’s the question of whether or not the various plot threads and multiple characters might cause the whole enterprise to topple in on itself (filming was halted for several months while producers and writers figured out how to carry on the storyline), but right now I’m invested.