Westworld is better than Game Of Thrones If you’ve heard anything about new sci-fi drama Westworld over the past few weeks, it’s probably that it’s the “new […]

If you’ve heard anything about new sci-fi drama Westworld over the past few weeks, it’s probably that it’s the “new Game of Thrones” – the inevitable line trotted out, given it is another epic drama on HBO. Safe to say, it isn’t – but it certainly makes for an interesting companion piece.

Over the past six years, Game of Thrones has served up a steady stream of sex, violence and, most controversially, sexual violence against women, leaving its critics questioning whether, beneath its serious drama trappings, it is exploitative entertainment.

Westworld’s very subject, meanwhile, is exploitative entertainment in extremis: it’s about the goings-on in an amusement park filled with robots where human guests can live out their fantasies of sex, violence, and sexual assault with apparently non-sentient beings. You don’t have to be a genius to see the darkly metaphorical implications for the modern-day viewer.

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It’s part of a particularly rich seam of TV about TV at the moment. Television shows set around television shows are nothing new, of course: from The Dick Van Dyke Show to 30 Rock, the TV studio has proved a good backdrop for comedy, especially. Then we’ve had the flourishing sub-genre of newsroom satires, from Drop the Dead Donkey to The Day Today.

The new wave of TV about TV

But just as commentary about television has opened up online, so TV makers themselves are engaging more deeply with the knotty questions of who, what and why we watch – and lifting the curtain to uncomfortable effect. Westworld aside, I’m thinking especially of Unreal, the brilliant (for the first series at least) US drama about the making of a Bachelor-style dating show which focused on the behind-the-scenes arch manipulation of the producers.

I’m also thinking of shows that, while less obviously about TV, have clearly nodded to current conversations swirling around the medium, notably about diversity and representation. To take two examples, the opening episode of the latest series of Amazon’s Transparent saw its well-heeled white protagonist Maura make a misbegotten journey to the rougher side of LA to help a young, black, trans woman – a canny way to acknowledge its characters’ privilege; while, less successfully, the second series of Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt had an episode which combatively and very directly responded to online discussion of its first-series “race problem”.

Meanwhile, back on this side of the Atlantic, the Operation Yewtree drama National Treasure, with that grimly ironic title, has been forcing viewers to reconsider one of the very darkest questions in television history: how an entertainment culture of such murkiness was allowed to thrive all those years.

Internal interrogation

As that last example makes clear, TV about TV isn’t just intellectual game-playing: at a time when the next US President might be a former reality-TV presenter, the medium seems more ripe than ever for internal interrogation.

Of course, in Westworld’s case, you could say that HBO is having its cake and eating it: a show dissecting the apparent appetite for depictions of sex, violence, and sexual violence against women that also features…you’ve guessed it. And, indeed, it’s received some damning criticisms on this front: just as the Westworld park’s creators are beginning to lose control over what goes on, so the show’s creators have no control over how the conversation around its content progresses, of course.

But the fact they deliberately raised the conversation in the first place? That, in my eyes, makes it not “the new Game of Thrones”, but better.