Up until its last half-hour when Yul Brynner’s fearsome robot gunslinger engages relentless pursuit mode, Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld is a romp. Its premise—the android attractions in a high-tech theme park malfunction with deadly consequences—may be nightmarish, but the film is rollicking. There’s a lively bar brawl set to old-timey piano, a cartoonish prison-break, a comedy underdog who appoints himself sheriff… Any blood we see is poster paint red and the brothel scenes now feel as chaste as Sunday school.

HBO’s TV adaptation goes a different route. Devoid of high-jinks, it starts serious and stays that way. This is cerebral sci-fi that asks more complex questions than “what if the humanoid attractions in a high-tech theme park malfunctioned with deadly consequences?”

The new Westworld picks up all the philosophical and ethical threads of modern AI fiction and reality—notions of freedom, identity, morality and power—and adds to them. Grief and memory are also themes, while the competing priorities of the theme park’s various behind-the-scenes departments (narrative vs finance vs auteur directorial vision) make for a neat allegory about movie-making.

Or more properly, TV-making. Even if creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are guilty of describing it as one, this is no movie. That’s the point. It takes and expands Crichton’s feature-film into something that couldn’t fit into even 2016’s flabby cinematic run-times. The first season is ten episodes and judging by the first four previewed to press, you wouldn’t want it any shorter.