Planned series finales, like this year’s surprise-to-everyone-but-the-showrunners endings of Penny Dreadful and The Jim Gaffigan Show, are more common than they used to be, perhaps in part because TV showrunners—who, presumably, would like to end their shows on a positive note rather than being quietly canceled well past their prime—are becoming more powerful. Even Game Of Thrones, HBO’s biggest moneymaker, has an end in sight after two more truncated seasons. So it’s not surprising that, according to a new article in Entertainment Weekly, the showrunners of HBO’s upcoming Westworld already have their entire series planned out.
That’s assuming, of course, that the show doesn’t go the way of its network sibling Vinyl and end after just one season. But given the pre-air hype for the show—only some of which had to do with a risque casting call for a massive orgy scene—that seems unlikely. Regardless of what happens, showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have an arc in mind for the show, which, as it turns out, they figured out during those scary-sounding production delays back in January.
As star James Marsden teases in a frustratingly vague interview with EW, “It wasn’t about getting the first 10 [episodes] done, it was about mapping out what the next five or six years are going to be. We wanted everything in line so that when the very last episode airs and we have our show finale, five or seven years down the line, we knew how it was going to end the first season.”
So maybe it’ll be five years, or maybe it’ll be six or seven. They’re not saying, exactly. But either way, Westworld has it all figured out.
Westworld debuts on HBO on October 2.