Beyond Westworld (1980)

Debuting March 5, 1980. CBS, 8/7pm Central

Delos, builders of Westworld, must stop Quaid. Assigned, is security chief John Moore and special agent Pam Williams. “Let’s face it John, it’s your wits against Quaid’s machines!”

Beyond Westworld was one of a dozen new shows on CBS that replaced fall failures for the 1979-1980 TV season. Several of these series had very short 5-to-6-episode test runs with the show given the boot if not an immediate success. These included The Contender with Marc Singer in his first leading role; Hagen – a legal drama with Chad Everett in the title role; Phyl & Mikhy, a cold war sitcom; Flo with Polly Holliday, which was renewed for a second season; and this series that was the briefest flash in the pan on the CBS mid-season schedule.

Westworld of course had been a successful movie franchise with two installments. The initial 1973 film grossed $16.5 million against its estimated $1.3 million budget. Written and directed by Michael Crichton, it was his first outing as a film director, and Crichton’s story was an original concept conceived specifically for the film.

Westworld took place in the near future of 1983, when a corporation named Delos opened a high-tech adult amusement park populated with lifelike androids mostly indistinguishable from humans. For $1000 a day, guests could visit any of three themed ‘worlds’: Western World, featuring a romanticized, largely mythologized stereotypical American Old West; Medieval World, a presentation of Middle Ages Europe; and Roman World, where visitors could be immersed in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii – pre-volcanic destruction, of course. Due to the high degree of realism of the androids, simply called robots in the film, guests could engage in sexual encounters, jousting, swordfights, and gunfights with them –with the battles ending in the ‘death’ of the robot antagonists, while safety protocols were designed to prevent the human guests from coming to harm. 

When the robots begin experiencing breakdowns and system failures that spread across Delos from one ‘world’ to the next like an infection, human guests everywhere must fend for themselves against murderous robots and the two leads played by James Brolin and the mustachioed Richard Benjamin must face off against Yul Brynner’s gunslinger robot for real – a duel which one of them will not survive.  

Although a sequel was produced by another studio, the story it presented was ignored in the proposed TV series continuity that writer Lou Shaw pitched to MGM. When a pilot was produced and screened for network and studio executives, a 6-episode test run was greenlit – giving Shaw and crew only two weeks to scramble into production.  

The pilot episode, appropriately titled “Westworld Destroyed”, starts with the announcement that Westworld has been destroyed. It reveals that the previously unmentioned Simon Quaid, assistant to Professor Oppenheimer, sabotaged Westworld and stole over 200 robots, placing them in key positions worldwide. The cast of included Jim McMullin as John Moore, James Wainwright as Simon Quaid, William Jordan as Professor Joseph Oppenheimer, and Judith Chapman as Laura Garvey. Cassandra Peterson, who would later become Elvira, also appeared in the pilot. Ignorning Futureworld, the series would focus on the aftermath of the original Westworld, with the sabotage being attributed to Quaid rather than a computer virus. The series also dropped the concept of robots having imperfect hands, which was a way to identify them in the film.

In the second episode, “My Brother’s Keeper,” Connie Sellecca is introduced as Pamela Williams, a federal agent and former protégé of Simon Quaid. The episode involves Quaid attempting to take over an oil company by exploiting gambling debts and replacing a football player with a robot…. The opening segment of the series was altered from the pilot, with a mild profanity (“hell”) changed to “heck”. Incredibly, after this second episode, CBS canceled Beyond Westworld.

The third episode, “Sound of Terror,” which was the final episode to air, involves Quaid stealing uranium from a nuclear power plant under the guise of a rock concert protest. John Moore and Pamela Williams pose as PR managers to find the Quaidbot, who is armed with an atomic bomb. The episode featured Rene Auberjonois and Ronee Blakley as guest stars…. The episodes “The Lion” and “Takeover” were not aired in the US until 1992. “The Lion” involves the Delos team investigating Delos electronics in a racecar, and “Takeover” features Quaid implanting computer chips into people’s brains to control them, targeting a gubernatorial candidate with the potential of reaching the White House. It was during filming of this episode that news of show cancellation reached the cast and crew.

Behind the scenes, Beyond Westworld faced numerous production challenges. Casting was difficult, as many actors were hesitant to commit to a TV pilot. Starting with the second episode, Connie Sellecca was a last-minute replacement for Judith Chapman due to an illness. There were also issues with shifting executives at CBS and financing problems at MGM. The pilot cleverly reused footage from the original Westworld movie with new voiceover exposition, as well as borrowing footage MGM’s Ice Station Zebra to cut costs. Lou Shaw’s writing process involved testing the story on his six-year-old daughter to ensure it was easy to understand. However, the show airing during the defacto ‘family hour’ meant a fairly tame series with no visible firearms or any kind of real weapons to go up against the robots, defeating them with whatever is handy – a fire extinguisher, a letter opener, or exposed electrical wiring.

Unfortunately, audiences weren’t really given the opportunity to judge the show based on its original 6-episode order. The ratings numbers from just two airings decided Beyond Westworld’s fate: a result of CBS’s relentless pursuit of winning the ratings war for the season. Despite its very short run, Beyond Westworld is available on DVD. A podcast is streaming from Forgotten TV that goes into the series in detail.

Some concepts and themes explored in Westworld would later appear in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. In 2016, Jonathan Nolan brought Westworld back to television as a reimagined series for HBO. The HBO series delves far deeper into the mechanics of a Westworld theme park as well as the dark impulses of human nature and has been a critical and commercial success.

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