Andor (Season 1)
There has been a high number of recent Star Wars streaming series to the point that I imagine, regardless of their average quality, it would be all but impossible even for the biggest Star Wars fans to keep up with them without getting burnt out. I haven't bothered with most of them since the first season of Mandalorian but people've been singing the praises for Andor ever since the first season premiered in 2022 which is why I finally decided to bite the bullet and actually watch it.
Andor, for better and for worse, resolves to take Star Wars seriously. Which is not a decision I categorically disagree with, I think that the setting can accommodate gritty drama along with light hearted adventure but I'd have to lie if I said I didn't somewhat prefer the latter. Andor depicts the Star Wars universe in the early years of the Empire as a totalitarian dystopia. Mass surveillance, military occupation, dismantling of the rule of law, cruel labour camps, torture of prisoners... all that good stuff. It mostly follows titular character Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna, a young man from an underdeveloped planet who gets roped into what would eventually develop into the rebellion.
There's some more stuff going on, despite its title it's an ensemble series. There's some political intrigue between wealthy dissidents in the galactic capital of Coruscant, a subplot about the imperial secret police and their internal disagreements, a plot arc set in an imperial prison. It casts a pretty wide net. Star Wars isn't exactly a world of great moral complexity. There isn't exactly a coherent ideology to the Empire's repression which is precisely why a show like Andor never needs to challenge that ideology. It's a a straw dictatorship built around a notion of generalized totalitarianism, the most interesting aspect of it being the fact that the leadership is secretly part of ancient esoteric religious sect. With that not being a factor in this show, Andor focuses not much on the ideology of the Empire as on its mechanisms.
It doesn't exactly present anything resembling an ambiguous conflict. To be fair, doing that is probably not possible. The Empire, in the larger Star Wars series, is practically introduced blowing up an entire planet, just to make an example of it. At that point you can't really turn around and ask people to consider whether they might have a good side. Andor's claim to emotional maturity mainly comes from depicting the early rebellion as a loose coalition of squabbling factions and morally ambivalent pragmatism which is frequently genuinely interesting.
A lot of your enjoyment of Andor will depend on whether you think there is a point to playing Star Wars as a gritty drama about life under dictatorship. Because, mind, I do understand what people see in this series. The multiple view points, relatively unflinching violence, gloomy imagery and understated acting along with some genuinely heady dialogue give it an appearance of prestige television that works hard at attempting to elevate the material from its pulp space opera roots. The light sabers and most of the other more whimsical, fantastical elements are practically entirely absent from Andor and very rarely is an attempt at comic relief made. If nothing else, it commits to what it's doing.
I liked Andor well enough for what it is, but I also don't particularly feel like I need more of it. It's just... this shows the central conflict of the Star Wars series from a fresh new angle and with a very different tone. Which is cool. It focuses on the suffering and the brutality of the Empire's rule and on the way people are starting to defy it. It conveys all of that quite effectively, it has strong world building, we get a feel for what the world of Star Wars was actually like during that time period. But now that that's been established, where are you gonna go from there? Because we know how this conflict will be resolved. That's what the original movies are about. At this point I feel like all that's left to do with another season is insist on the points the first season has already made.
Like I said, I liked this fine, I get why so many people like it. I'm happy I've seen it. But I don't exactly feel like there's much more mileage left to it and I don't think think there's much point to continuing it, just because it's popular. Then again, that's what can be said for the Star Wars series as a whole, isn't it?
Fist and not miss anything. Those are Still at the time when these shows were on Netflix, and before everything was falling apart between them and Disney.