HBO Max to remove Westworld, Love Life, and The Nevers amid “broader financial review”
It's a wonder that there's anything left on HBO Max at all
Having already canceled Minx earlier today (despite the show wrapping production on a second season that is now not going to air), along with announcing that the show’s first season will be pulled from HBO Max, Warner Bros. Discovery and its bloodthirsty boss David Zaslav have ordered a few more murders: Love Life, Westworld, and The Nevers are all going to be pulled from HBO Max as part of what Deadline grimly describes as a “broader financial review” of the streaming service’s slate ahead of the end of the year.
Love Life was HBO Max’s first original scripted series and a big selling point in its early days (“Look, famous person Anna Kendrick!”), so removing it from the service entirely is a pretty clear indication of just how fucked things are over at Warner Bros. Discovery. The anthology comedy series focused on a character played by Kendrick (who was also an executive producer) in season one and shifted to a character played by William Jackson Harper for season two, with both seasons focusing on the protagonists’ adventures as they navigated New York’s dating scene. A third season had never been ruled out until now, but now it has, and the show will also just be… gone forever, apparently?
As for Westworld and The Nevers, the fact that they’re being removed from HBO Max is somehow even more surprising than the loss of Love Life, because the two of them are real HBO shows—not HBO Max shows. The Nevers, a period sci-fi show created by some guy who stepped down long before it aired, had its first season split into two halves. The first half aired early last year, and the second half was supposed to air at some point next year. Variety says that sources believe the show will get to finish out its first season somewhere other than HBO, but who knows how that’ll work out.
Westworld, meanwhile, was unjustly canceled a few months after airing its fourth season—which ended on a clear setup for a final season that will now never happen. And while this will surely be lost on Zaslav, who seems to actively hate movies and TV shows, a big part of the show’s second season was about uploading the consciousnesses of the robot citizens of Westworld into a digital cloud paradise where they could be free forever, so erasing the show from his own digital cloud has effectively made Zaslav an on-the-nose Westworld bad guy. It’s like if the head of Disney literally collected the six Infinity Stones and used them to wipe out half of all Marvel movies as a tax write-off.
This all also means that any HBO project is basically one bad day away from being pulled from streaming—possibly forever. Westworld was never as big as it was when it first started, but there’s no reason to think anything on HBO Max is sacred at this point. The second it becomes morse cost-effective to remove a show entirely than to keep it and pay residuals to the cast and crew, Zaslav has made it clear that he will make that cut. And this is all for a streaming service that is planning to raise its prices and then jettison the only good part of its branding next year.
We say go for broke, Warner Bros. Discovery. You know how much money you could save by canceling season two of House Of The Dragon? Or if you pulled The Sopranos? Hell, get out of this business entirely and get into real estate. You can’t possibly be any worse at that than you are at this, because you are fucking awful at this!