PT Entertainment
In the press notes for Andor, the latest Disney+ Star Wars series, star Diego Luna says he was attracted to reprise his role from Rogue One as Rebel spy Cassian Andor “because I was told it will be a 12-episode series that will be as much like a film as it can be.” Later, he says, “It feels like we are making a very long movie.”
This is a depressingly common sentiment in TV these days, suggesting one or two things. Somehow, 20-plus years after The Sopranos elevated the idea of what television storytelling could be, film people are still on some level embarrassed by the idea of working in TV, and/or(*) they simply do not understand the ways that the two mediums are different — nor that “a very long movie “is almost never a good idea.
(*) Not to be confused with this show’s title character.
Unless you are David Simon or have worked extensively with David Simon, you are almost certainly setting yourself up to fail with this approach. A season of television was not designed to be an eight-to-22-hour movie. Television having individual episodes is a feature, not a bug. Whether you are telling one big story or a series of smaller ones, episodes are meant to function as individual narrative units. Characters have specific objectives that are on some level resolved within that unit, and the action is best served building to some kind of climax, even if that climax is ultimately “To Be Continued.” There are ways to do this that are almost entirely serialized (again, see The Wire). There are ways to do this that are largely standalone (your typical well-made cop/doctor/lawyer procedural). And there are ways to blend the two (which Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, among others, did expertly), so that there are a lot of distinct, memorable episodes that function as their own entertaining thing, even as they are servicing a massive overarching plot.
The great majority of people who talk the “we think of our season as a 10-hour movie” talk tend to be screenwriters who have no previous experience in television. Often, they are taking an idea they couldn’t sell as a feature film and simply elongating it, without any thought or care given to how tedious and repetitive a movie’s three-act structure feels when stretched over that amount of time. (Even famously long films like Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather Part II knew to cap themselves at a shade over three hours.) But even some TV veterans can fall into this trap, like the showrunners of the various Netflix Marvel series, who kept kneecapping themselves by being unable or unwilling to pause the main plot of their seasons and just show the heroes being heroes for an hour.
But if this is such a widespread plague, you may wonder, why am I picking on poor Diego Luna and his collaborators? First, the four episodes of Andor given to critics for review are a particularly frustrating example of this approach, with the format constantly undercutting the interesting things the series is doing. Second, you would think that the people at Lucasfilm would by now understand the value of making television that actually functions as television.
The Mandalorian kicked off both the existence of Disney+ and this new phase of the Star Wars franchise. It is unquestionably a TV show. Each week, Mando and Baby Yoda Grogu go to a different planet and have a different adventure that is largely resolved over the course of that week’s installment. Even when the seasons build to a more serialized climax, the individual chapters still have some kind of self-contained mission for our heroes.
This was followed by The Book of Boba Fett, which did some notable individual episodes but also blurred the lines more often about where one part of the story was meant to end and another was meant to begin. (It had other problems, too — notably that it had no reason to exist once Mando had been given everything that fans once loved about Boba Fett — but the structure didn’t help.) Obi-Wan Kenobi was quite literally based on a movie idea that Lucasfilm couldn’t make for some reason or other, so it got turned into a six-hour blob of (largely nonsensical) plot.
If Mandalorian is not universally beloved by its audience, it is as close as anything can come in this fractured pop-culture age. Its success should have taught the keepers of the franchise a lesson or three about how to tell stories for TV versus movies.
And yet.
Now comes Andor, a Rogue One prequel created by that movie’s co-writer Tony Gilroy. Gilroy is a hell of a screenwriter. But other than a consulting producer credit on a couple of seasons of House of Cards (a show that often fell prey to pretending it was just a long movie), Gilroy has no experience in TV, and it shows. There is barely any shape to these first four episodes. Three of them don’t even build to any kind of real climax, but just seem to stop at a random point, as if Gilroy, director Toby Haynes, and their editors shrugged and said, “Eh, nobody will care once the autoplay function turns on.”
The first two episodes are especially lacking in any kind of appreciable form. Perhaps not surprisingly, Disney+ is launching the show this week with the first three episodes, since the third is the one where things finally start happening, as well as the only one that actually has something that feels like a conclusion to one phase of the story.
It’s a shame, not only because Luna’s Cassian Andor occupies an interesting place within the larger Star Warsuniverse, but because Andor gets off to a promising start before things quickly begin to drag.
Rogue One was the first Star Wars film to be only tangentially connected to the Skywalker family. As Cassian leads a team of mismatched, emotionally damaged allies on a suicide mission to obtain the plans for the first Death Star, the movie takes on a much darker tone than the ones about Luke, Anakin, and Rey, while still demonstrating the flair for adventure and casual world-building that made the franchise so huge to begin with.
Andor seems to be pushing this even further at the start. It is five years before the events of Rogue One. Cassian is not yet part of the Rebellion, but simply a man with a tragic past trying to get by under the harsh rule of the Empire. The show opens with a sequence owing more to Blade Runner than Star Wars, as Cassian visits the red light district of a corporate-run mining planet, walking carefully through a rainy night, questioning a sex worker at a brothel about the whereabouts of someone he once knew, and getting into a nasty fight when two other customers take a dislike to his appearance. (Someone will later say, “They clearly harassed a human with dark features.”)
But once Cassian returns to his current home on another industrial planet, Ferrix, things begin to drift. We meet other colorful characters: Cassian’s adorably anxious droid B2EMO (the franchise’s most on-the-nose name since Elan Sleazebaggano tried to sell death sticks to Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones); his mechanic friend Bix (Adria Arjona); his adoptive mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw); Bix’s mysterious trading partner Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård); and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), a corporate security officer who is basically the Star Wars equivalent of a mall cop desperate to be treated like the genuine article.
It’s an interesting group of supporting characters. Soller is pretty great as we watch Syril struggle with the vast gulf between his heroic fantasies and the uglier realities of life in the Empire, and Stellan Skarsgård is having himself a palpably great time playing a chameleonic figure like Luthen. Yet Gilroy struggles to justify the need to give Cassian Andor his own series. Luna’s fine, but Cassian wasn’t one of the people who most popped off the screen in Rogue One. Here he comes across as a more muted Han Solo, quietly in it for himself, even as people like Luthen keep trying to recruit him for more important matters like the Rebel Alliance. He’s almost entirely reactive, following the agendas of other people. We know where this is all going, and while that’s not automatically a crippling problem (see Better Call Saul), Cassian in these early episodes does not seem worth such a protracted origin story.
Like Star Trek: Picard, Andor seems a case of a mostly family-friendly franchise taking on the superficial trappings of more adult storytelling — in addition to the brothel, there are words that Hayden Christensen was never allowed to say — without feeling appreciably more sophisticated in storytelling or theme than what came before. And like Picard, Andor quickly gets bogged down in an ongoing plot it doesn’t quite know how to break down from one episode to the next.
It’s promising that the third episode gets things moving and seems more focused overall. (It’s also by far the best use of flashbacks to Cassian’s traumatic childhood.) The fourth episode then shifts into an entirely new phase of things, with a change in locale, several new characters — notably Genevieve O’Reilly reprising her Rogue One role as secret Rebel leader Mon Mothma — and a new objective involving a heist. But even that one meanders quite a bit and again stops at a completely random point.
This whole “12-hour movie” mess started because film studios have largely stopped making whole genres, particularly those for/about adults who do not have superpowers. As a result, the people who want to tell those stories have to do it on television. But the upshot is that both mediums are diminished. Movies are lacking variety, while TV is now being flooded by shows that are too long, too slow, and too amorphous, only because they were originally intended to be told in a much tighter form. And these shows are made by people who act like they’d much rather be doing this for the big screen.
While we’re still primarily on Ferrix, Gilroy and Haynes introduce a nameless character whose job is essentially to be the local bell ringer. He has no spoken dialogue, yet we see him preparing for his twice-daily duty with great vigor and joy. It is perhaps the franchise’s best use of such a minor character since the rancor keeper cried in Return of the Jedi, offering a sense that all the people in this galaxy far, far away have their own inner lives and stories, even if we are mostly focusing on the same group over and over again. But as the man who signals the start and end of every day on Ferrix, he also ironically represents the kind of structure that Andor is so sorely lacking.
The first three episodes of Andor premiere Sept. 21 on Disney+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first four of 12 episodes.
