'Andor': My Awe Over a (Pricey) TV Galaxy Far, Far AwayA preview of my Tony Gilroy interview as I pay homage to his expensive, audacious Star Wars epic — the last gasp of streaming's go-for-broke era
Greetings from Los Angeles, where as you read this I’m recovering from a lavish lunch full of treachery and deceit, courtesy of Peacock and its FYC efforts for my beloved The Traitors. On our way into the bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, we guests were each handed a sealed piece of paper that revealed whether we were to play the role of traitors or faithfuls. As a faithful I was personally shocked when the Ankler himself, Richard Rushfield, revealed himself to be a traitor. Oh, the betrayal!
While I recover from that truly shocking twist, I’m also preparing for a busy weekend of conversations with a lot of other Emmy contenders. On Saturday, I’ll be recording live, in-person interviews for the Prestige Junkie podcast, then heading over to watch our fearless Ankler leader Janice Min talk about the politics of storytelling with the showrunners from The Diplomat (Debora Cahn), The Residence (Paul William Davies) and Zero Day (Eric Newman). RSVP here to join us! Then on Sunday my Series Business colleagues Elaine Low and Lesley Goldberg will join me for a major event we’re hosting with the DGA, gathering more than half a dozen of the most interesting directors working in television today, including Zero Day helmer Lesli Linka Glatter, Hacks’ Lucia Aniello and Severance’s Jessica Lee Gagné. If you want to RSVP to that event, I’ll see you there! To prepare for all of this, I’ve spent the past few weeks watching a lot of television and marveling at the incredible range of shows Emmy voters can consider this year. Yes, TV budgets are shrinking, everybody wants procedurals and comedies like the ones that have been around for 50 years, and the days of an exciting new creator being thrown millions of dollars seem to be well behind us. (Unless you’re Phoebe Waller-Bridge, at least.) But for all the pessimism we’re hearing out there, what’s actually making it to the air is still pretty dang exciting, particularly when you narrow it down to the 20-odd shows at the top of the major Emmy categories. Will the industry’s current landscape make it possible for this many great shows to exist five years from now? That part seems a lot less clear, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot this week in the wake of the series finale of Andor. Part of the initial crop of Star Wars shows that Lucasfilm planned for the original Disney+ launch in 2019, Andor is a relic of an era of television that feels increasingly distant, a time when a studio throwing limitless money toward its streaming service seemed like smart business. With a reported budget of $645 million across its two 12-episode seasons, Andor is staggeringly expensive even by the profligate standards of the streaming era. It is also worth every penny. Visually stunning, exquisitely acted and written with exceptional care by creator Tony Gilroy and his tight creative team, Andor is a thunderous argument for the value of handing big budgets to the right storytellers. And it’s unlikely that anything like it will ever exist again. Not Just ‘Another Resistance Origin Story’ When Andor was officially announced in 2018, neither Disney+ nor its first blockbuster series, The Mandalorian, even existed yet; fans greeted the news with muted enthusiasm or outright bafflement, wondering why, out of the entire galaxy’s worth of Star Wars characters, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) would get his own spinoff. “This news is extremely underwhelming,” wrote one Redditor. “I really don’t want another resistance origin story,” wrote another. Cassian was a secondary but pivotal character in the 2016 Star Wars spinoff Rogue One, which grossed $1 billion worldwide but was eventually overshadowed by new installments of the Skywalker Saga that surrounded it. Set in the period immediately before the original 1977 Star Wars, it follows Cassian and his fellow rebels as they try to deliver the blueprints to the Death Star that will eventually be used to blow it up. A famously troubled production that was rewritten, and possibly even re-directed, by Michael Clayton and Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy, Rogue One was not an obvious pick to bring the Star Wars universe to television, particularly since in its finale — spoiler alert! — all of its main characters, Cassian included, are killed in action. For Andor, Gilroy has described his mission with Star Wars as akin to taking the Latin Mass out of the Catholic Church — that is, removing the mysticism and baked-in iconography that seemed to define the entire operation — and making something new out of what’s left. Diehard fans have occasionally balked, complaining that Andor doesn’t just lack lightsabers and Skywalkers, but also the colorful aliens and dashes of humor that have always been essential to the franchise. I’m not here to argue with them. But Gilroy’s defiantly human-scaled, rigorously written version is, to me, the best Star Wars has ever been.  Andor is what we all thought we wanted from the limitless expanse of television — a chance to expand familiar worlds we loved, or stretch out a story across many hours instead of the tight 90-120 minutes of a feature film. When I spoke to Gilroy and Luna for next week’s episode of the podcast, Gilroy praised the freedom of Andor’s 12-hour seasons, allowing him not just to expand the story that leads to Rogue One but also introduce such indelible new supporting characters played by Denise Gough and Kyle Soller. Watching Andor often feels like the early seasons of Game of Thrones or even The Wire, in which every new character you meet is not a distraction from the larger story, but a welcome opportunity to get to know somebody new. It’s a show in which a dinner party with a menacing mother-in-law, played by Kathryn Hunter, becomes as compelling as a chase scene. By contrast, how many times have we seen a TV show promise to expand a story and then get bogged down in it, turning side plots into dead ends instead of windows into new worlds? Right now, both Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and HBO’s House of the Dragon continue to tell new stories in Middle Earth and Westeros, respectively, but with a fraction of the power of their predecessors. Even something like Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent, using 10 episodes to adapt the same thriller that was once a two-hour Harrison Ford movie, feels more indulgent than expansive. Just because you can make a story longer, to crib from yet another franchise, doesn’t mean that you should. ‘Anybody Tells Me I Can’t Do Something . . .’
The fact that Andor makes all of this world-building look easy is a testament to how hard it is; Gilroy describes part of his process as “beating the shit” out of both his own scripts and those submitted by his collaborators, who include his brother, Dan Gilroy, and House of Cards creator Beau Willimon. Initially planned for five seasons, Andor was simplified to two partly because of how incredibly intense the production process was. “It was absolutely evident how naive we had been in thinking we could ever do five,” Gilroy tells me in the podcast interview airing next week. “And it was clear there was no way to accelerate the process or make it less expensive.” Even in its shortened, two-season form, Andor is not at all diminished. The second season hops across the four years required to get Cassian to the beginning of Rogue One, jumping forward a year in time after each three-episode chunk. (It is the first series I can think of in which the streaming-era habit of releasing a batch of episodes, instead of one a week or all at once, actually makes sense.) Each three-episode segment feels more or less like its own movie — particularly the thrilling run of episodes 7, 8 and 9, which capture the devastating event known in Star Wars canon as the Ghorman Massacre. If these things mean nothing to you, I promise that was me just a few weeks ago, before Andor got me fully under its spell. The final three episodes of Andor that aired this week tighten their focus a bit, lingering on the final moments of the spymaster Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård. Invented by Gilroy for Andor, Luthen is nonetheless a pivotal figure in the rebellion that defines Star Wars lore, operating in the shadows and refusing public connections to the larger cause. He’s such a lone wolf that when Cassian brings in the intelligence that Luthen died to protect — the very existence of the Death Star, which kicks off the action in Rogue One — the leaders of the rebellion don’t quite believe him. Luthen did things his own way, and changed history, but was always on the outside because of it. Watching the end of Luthen’s story, I couldn’t help thinking of Gilroy, drafted into the Star Wars universe because of his friendship with Kathleen Kennedy more than by any devotion to the material, and continually skeptical about the rules and traditions that define this enormous, valuable franchise. “I hate precedent,” he told me in our conversation. “When anybody tells me that I can’t do something, it makes me want to do it.” Gilroy’s adventure with Star Wars truly seems to be over this time, and the universe is moving on without him. Next summer will bring the big-screen The Mandalorian and Grogu, and though there’s a second season of the Rosario Dawson-led Ahsoka in the works, most of the upcoming Star Wars shows are animated — quite likely a reaction to the large budgets required by Andor and the already-canceled The Acolyte. With even Bob Iger admitting they made too much original content for Disney+, there’s no reason to believe something as expensive or ambitious as Andor will exist again any time soon. So thank God the streaming content money hose, as short-lived as it turned out to be, was aimed at Andor in the exact right moment. If it is nominated for best drama series at the Emmys as it was for its first season, it will be a fitting conclusion to this era of television that now feels very definitely over. Unlike Luthen Rael, Gilroy will at least get to stick around to see that victory himself. Follow us: Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn | Bluesky | TikTok | X | Threads | Facebook | WhatsApp ICYMI
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