"We’re about to pilot a show that I think will work to be a what you’d call a franchise show," HBO's programming president Michael Lombardo said of J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan's Westworld series - which is based on Michael Crichton's 1973 sci-fi film about a robotic theme park, and was given a pilot production commitment by HBO last August.

During an executive Q&A session at the TCA press tour, Lombardo spoke about how Abrams and Nolan's (Person of Interest, The Dark Knight) take on the show would be "similar only in construct.""Hope we’re going to start shooting this summer. We’re casting right now, and I assume, you know, announcements will come out when those deals happen," Lombardo stated. "Obviously, it takes place within some time in the unspecified future within an amusement park populated by robots. Beyond that, I think it’s its own thing, and Jonah and Lisa [Joy] have done it and the script is one of the more exciting scripts we’ve read in a very, very long time.""There’s no Yul Brynner and tonally it’s very different. At the same time, it has some of the elements, the basic elements that make the idea of it really exciting."Nolan, who co-wrote the Dark Knight trilogy with his brother Christopher and David Goyer, is writing the pilot with Lisa Joy (Burn Notice) and will direct it. This is the second team-up for Abrams and Nolan, following CBS' Person of Interest.Abrams and Nolan's take on Westworld has been previous described as "a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin."Additional reporting by Eric Goldman

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity