You wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading the geek press or social media, but Lucasfilm is in the midst of what should go down as its most sustained creative hot streak in years. The Disney-owned company best-known for Star Wars productions has been maligned for second-guessing its own creative decisions, for flooding the market with too many nostalgia-driven Star Wars TV series, for overspending on budgets and underdelivering creatively, and for its seeming inability to get a new Star Wars movie onto the big screen after 2019’s underwhelming trilogy-capper The Rise of Skywalker, a movie seemingly made in a blind panic while doomscrolling through Reddit posts about The Last Jedi, which by many accounts was exactly what Star Wars needed (a movie with a point of view and fresh ideas that nonetheless connect back to multiple iterations of the series). Instead, voices raced through the internet: They’re too woke! They’re too cowardly! They don’t respect the franchise! They’re too fixated on legacy characters! They hate the fans! They also show them too much deference! Basically, as far as a lot of folks are concerned, Lucasfilm hasn’t done a damn thing right in years if not the entire decade since The Force Awakens brought Star Wars roaring back.
But here’s what Lucasfilm has actually been up to over the past seven or eight months: Putting out two shows that introduced a bunch of new characters, aimed at audiences that might not otherwise be all that excited about Star Wars stuff. Skeleton Crew, which just ended its first (and possibly only) season, and The Acolyte, which aired its first (and definitely only) season over last summer, are both among the best shows Lucasfilm has made. The company’s streak should continue later this spring, when their very best show Andor returns for its second (and final) season.
Disney, facing ratings for both recent shows that didn’t meet their lofty standards, may not share this enthusiasm. But the company’s seeming fixation on ratings, or whatever you call the amorphous streaming numbers that are treated as the equivalent of ratings, doesn’t seem to make much sense. Disney+ is mostly subscriber-supported, not ad-supported; isn’t the point of Star Wars on TV to keep and attract subscribers, which aren’t measured in minutes watched? It is difficult, of course, to determine whether either The Acolyte or Skeleton Crew succeeded in attracting or retaining subscribers. But both shows make creative plays for audiences that should be able to find purchase in this galaxy, but might not when faced with a bunch of nostalgia festivals aimed at 47-year-old malcontents.
Still, even a 47-year-old malcontent could probably find something to like about Skeleton Crew, which at the outset looked unnervingly like Lucasfilm paying reductive homage to Amblin adventure movies of the 1980s. (Just say The Goonies, guys. We know you pretty much just mean The Goonies, which is nonetheless an odd reference point for a series where every associate film is much, much better) That’s certainly in the show’s DNA, but as it went along (and before it reached a somewhat abrupt conclusion), the show mixed in aspects of less specifically ’80s-coded texts like Treasure Island, The Giver, and Oliver Twist. Even better, while one of its young protagonists looked up to the idea of the Jedi, the show resisted any temptation to introduce the specifics of the original trilogy into their world. (A restraint quite unlike The Mandalorian, which has been repeatedly unable to resist including Luke Skywalker in its narrative, and as a ridiculous CG creation no less.)
Recognizing that no child will likely be as starry-eyed over old Star Wars lore as Gen-X originalists, Skeleton Crew was then free to create its own little world of oddball characters I’d be happy to see again, especially Jude Law’s ultimately villainous pirate Jod Na Nawood; the scurvy-dog droid SM-33; the owlish Kh’ymm; and the cybernetic kid KB (Kyriana Kratter). Their designs and personalities reach beyond the good-soldiers-and-bad-troopers dynamics of so much recent Star Wars; even the initially sketchy concept of replicating the look of American suburbs on a far-off planet paid off surprisingly well. I wasn’t fond of every single plot turn or character – some of the child acting in the show is, ah, let’s say underdirected – and neither was my nine-year-old daughter. But it’s a show that feels made for her first, not her parents.
So, in its way, does The Acolyte, though it strikes me as more Star Wars for a YA audience. Naturally, this enraged a substantial chunk of the franchise’s horrible, horrible fanbase, who seem to want elaborate justifications for why women, people of color, and especially women of color would ever be in a space adventure series anyway. Leslye Headland’s study of a pre-prequel galaxy where Jedi attempt to cover up their fallibility and other factions grapple for different sorts of power has lusher, more tactile environments, from ship interiors to remote forests (to which plenty of people nonetheless responded with “this looks so cheap,” a charge that has been leveled at 90% of non-Dune mega-productions of the past five years), and a central dilemma that appeals to the uncertainties of youth. Though the show ends by tying into the much-discussed but mostly unseen Darth Plagueis as well as a Yoda cameo, most of The Acolyte manages to evoke a sense of mystery around this world that’s at times felt overmined for iconography. It even reinvigorates the tired cool space helmet trope. If its dialogue is a little corny and sometimes cluttered with therapy-speak, well, hey, being a young adult is embarrassing sometimes!
Not as embarrassing, though, as originalist Star Wars fans throwing fits over a show because it has witches and casts doubt on the Jedi (while still managing to show off some of the coolest-looking lightsaber battles since The Phantom Menace). If only the problem was isolated to those cranks! Disney itself (and its army of armchair financial analysts, formerly known as Twitter users) seems unsure of what, precisely, it wants from Star Wars now that they’ve realized that the death of theatrical exhibition may have been called prematurely. After mistakenly assuming the future of the franchise was streaming TV, they’ve now got turned around again and put into production a movie version of The Mandalorian, a truly perverse idea given that Mando is their series that has best utilized the weekly TV format. And they’re set to alienate any new fans (in demographics sorely needed to keep Star Wars going, even!) they may have gained by canceling The Acolyte and possibly Skeleton Crew. (And at this point, if the latter survives while the former was axed, the optics will still be pretty bad.)
Even some non-fans performatively lament how Star Wars has become a hit-and-miss TV franchise rather than the biggest movie series of all time. But unless Disney decides to simply release one new movie every two to three years, simply “be the biggest thing ever” is no kind of future game plan. Making shows like The Acolyte, Skeleton Crew, and the adult-oriented Andor, though, could help alleviate the pressure to make every Star Wars thing for every Star Wars fan, and relieve the sense of panic that infused The Rise of Skywalker. Let’s hope Lucasfilm can uncloud their vision and see this.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
