Star Wars Should Embrace Its Inner Sith, and Andor's Recent Success Proves It
Star Wars: Andor, directed by Tony Gilroy, received considerable acclaim, particularly compared to lackluster critical and audience reception of Disney's immediately preceding TV offerings, Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett.
As a culmination of that, it was recently announced that Andor has been nominated for two Critics' Choice Awards – one for Best Drama Series and the other for Best Actor in a Drama.
Both the fact of nominations and the choice of nominations are significant. Now, it is no surprise, that Andor, a hybrid of a heist movie, a prison break movie and a spy thriller, got nominated for drama. But notable is the fact, that an attempt to recreate darker, more serious genres in the galaxy far, far away, gained enough critical attention to be nominated. Fan opinion of Andor also has been favorable this far. Nearly everyone agrees that the series has been made competently.
This already inspired calls for greater amounts of darker, "more mature" content in Star Wars.
To a significant extent those calls are justified, Disney 's Star Wars offerings on average have a tendency to tone drama and violence down, even compared to what was normal for Star Wars before. But perhaps we should first see, whether Andor actually gets those awards.
There is also the question of Andor being largely ignored by the audience, despite its success among the critics, which we've covered before. Since then, the series got more attention, but it still lags considerably behind every other Star Wars TV series from Disney in terms of subscribers on Reddit, numbers of user reviews on review aggregator websites (even if those reviews it gets are far more positive), and, as far as we can tell, viewership.
It is, however, unfair to blame Andor and Tony Gilroy for this subpar performance in terms of viewership – not only it is a genre-shiting prequel to a spin-off in a franchise which core fanbase is heavily driven by nostalgia, it came on the heels of two poorly received series in a row, so hype for it was nonexistent. Disney is already giving Andor another chance with Season 2 currently in production, and expected to arrive in 2024. And should give a chance to more content, exploring darker corners of the Star Wars universe, if that is going to result in more series of the same quality as Andor.