ANDOR aka Glum Village : its own thread

i don't recall ever seeing more than a handful of characters on screen at once doing anything meaningful - probably a result of those shows all being shot on the volume. i think i posted how weirdly empty the dingy planet in obi wan felt compared to a similar scene from blade runner shot with good old fashioned sets.

in other words, mandalorian is still a hero / western, blah blah blah, small scale stories. andor feels more like, i dunno, i keep on thinking of psychohistory a la asimov/foundation. trying to tell the story of largescale / grand movements across the galaxy, as far as a medium like straightforward linear tv character narrative can, anyway, without feeling like the history channel.

this discussion reminds me of this great tweet

It's really funny whenever they mention the emperor on Andor and you remember what his deal is. It's like if The Wire was set in a city where the unseen mayor is a cackling goblin who shoots lightning at people

— Brooks Otterlake (@i_zzzzzz) November 23, 2022

Also, the actors in Andor are good, whereas what I saw of The Mandalorian was full of terrible acting.

must agree the acting on andor has been v good.

a primary character in mando was a charismatic muppet with an appetite for intelligent-frog eggs.

peak Star Wars has to be somewhere between, where we get a peek behind Tarkin types that is a little deeper and also more egg boy

hah, agreed!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pJVHwmLibsAgrohTyZlab?si=53c6feffc68f42ac

I tried watching this, and it just didn't grab me in any way… but nonetheless I can see that it is a high quality production, and so my disinclination to stick with it is my problem, not the show's… many many people have told me they think this is the best SW exponent ever… fair enuff! I more or less have a bad taste in my mouth from SW shit, think Lucas is a bullshit artist and not particularly smart, sophisticated or insightful, and have no warm and fuzzies for SW the way I do for DC, Marvel or Star Trek shit…

However! My wife watches a lot of BBC and adjacent european crime shows (and had only seen SW77 12 years ago, the force awakens with me in 2015 and exactly no other SW shit ever) and so she was right there with Andor, unlike me. Which makes me think that this show, which has as few references to existing lore as any brand extension show I've ever seen, doesn't need to be a star wars show… sorry, star wars STORY at all and would have been better off as its own thing entirely…

But! Maybe no one cares about anything unless its wedded no pre-existing IP! I might convey the sentiment in the above graf to one of my pals, and they'd say "but would anybody see this show if it wasn't attached to SW?" Maybe not! And that's a problem, that new productions must function as brand extension or no one will make the effort to see it. Same thing with the Watchmen show: it seems to me that show should have been its own thing, the points it was making were in no way indebted to Moore's work, and just as Rorschach = the Question is known to some nerds but in no way required knowledge to fathom what is going on, Lindelof could have made it plain that this new character = Laurie, this new character = Veidt and in that he could avoid going against Moore's wishes…

Brand extenstion is a scourge! Make new shit!

The streamers would like nothing more than to create lots of “original IP” that they could milk exclusively for years to come but audiences gravitate towards stuff they know

I'm extremely anti-IP-recycling, hate SW now too, and was reluctant to watch this. But I ended up really liking it and must admit that in this case, the IP serves a useful function: avoiding exposition and tedious "world-building." Since everyone goes in knowing what the empire & the rebellion are, the show is able to communicate a lot through costumes, accents, and decor. Now I do think it's entirely possible to do all that in an original series too, but still it was useful in this case.

On the audiences question, while I thought both movies were merely okay, the popularity of Glass Onion and Everything Everywhere All At Once suggest that people are actually dying to watch silly genre stuff that isn't so familiar and leaden with continuity.

It was helpful to me to watch Andor out of the hype cycle when it was first airing. I binged the whole thing last week - I'm barely invested in extended Wars, but I've always thought that SW was at its best when it got closer to its 70s science fiction roots. Thought it was great, no need to fret about season two.

I was surprised a friend didn’t quite get the gravitas of that ending and the callback, but screaming children might do that. Just a good end to the arc of wondering if Cassian is on the cause. Can a man just live under the empire and maybe take a job subverting it to continue living, or is it worth putting your life on the scale of rebellion or death, when rebellion may mean certain death?

I feel like im approaching it in a tony gilroy-sympathetic way where its like ... he already made the archetypal self-contained against the grain cinematic thriller in michael clayton, why not allow him a little expensive IP as a treat

Q&A with Adria Arjona, Denise Gough, Genevieve O'Reilly and Fiona Shaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7EBMge-ARo

Just finished this, and I loved it. But one thing that distracted me throughout the entire series was the fact that Diego Luna is apparently playing Paul McCartney in the biopic:

https://i0.wp.com/thebeatlezone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/download.jpg

!!

huge if true <3

very belatedly getting into this, watched the first half of it last night. I particularly like the Imperial Stand Ups where the project manager gets a dressing down.

i’m PISSED that this was originally envisioned as five seasons, each covering a year’s worth of diegetic time,

Sometimes you just need cereal

“That’s my cereal!” #Andor’s Kyle Soller loves Syril’s cereal as much as the rest of us. #StarWarsCelebration pic.twitter.com/X4JQlQoBvp

— Star Wars (@starwars) April 8, 2023

They really should firewall Andor from the shitshow that is the Lucasfilm marketing-and-fanboy-service department

But cereal

But Syril

Finally started watching this (on ep4) and it's wild how much better this is than any SW thing after the original trilogy, aside from Rogue One.

Yeah kinda crazy and just such a well-structured, tense season. The best parts are yet to come!

Finished this last week, the prison eps are really burned into my brain. Still can't believe that this was legit good, not just good enough for some Disney SW content.

just got irrationally angry thinking about how those imp bastards kicked b2emo!

After recent rewatch imho those Clone Wars final four episodes might be on a par with Andor in a number of ways.

just got irrationally angry thinking about how those imp bastards kicked b2emo!

Nothing irrational about it. I nearly cried when they threatened to turn off his power

when he's too scared to come out in the last episode :(

Not gonna lie it's been kinda disappointing to watch Mandalorian in its wake, it's fine and all but it's never excellent.

I always felt Mandalorian was coasting on a couple vv good aspects. Crucial ones, of course: the two main characters. It just still has that Saturday morning cartoon feel to me (despite the Pershing episode almost feeling like an Andor knockoff.)

mandalorian really went downhill after they focused on the other mandalorians. this new season was almost unwatchable for me. too goofy

i gave up 10 minutes into the second episode of this mandalorian season. maybe it was always a kids show but it felt like that more than prior seasons. maybe it just suffered in comparison to andor.

Nothing irrational about it. I nearly cried when they threatened to turn off his power

― jbn, Thursday, April 27, 2023 2:40 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not irrational while watching the show but irrational thinking about it months later!

The existence of the Mandalorian also necessitated a Boba Fett show in which the dude had to keep his helmet off most of the time and become sort of a perpetually bemused benevolent town mayor.

After recent rewatch imho those Clone Wars final four episodes might be on a par with Andor in a number of ways.

I also think those episodes were excellent, some of the best work SW has done, but you have to watch a LOT to get to that point, and much of it is not great. Think I mentioned somewhere that Clone Wars starts out bleh and gets steadily better and more consistent each season - increasing returns. One of those shows where I'd definitely recommend someone follow a guide and only watch the best/most important episodes

My kids have watched all of Clone Wars but now we’re watching them together. We are midway through season 2. It’s not bad but I’m glad to hear it gets better.

Mandalorian honestly lost me in s2 with every episode feeling like a pilot for another show. And then Boba Fett was infuriating that even existed at all, and then on top of that ruined the character. But my kids (and my inner kid) keep me watching. Agreed that Mando s3 was mostly a misfire. The Andor-like episode was a pale imitation and then it really didn’t lead anywhere either.

the intro of the other mandalorians way back was v cool suggesting some kind of interesting intra-cultural split and complexity, then they made it mostly awful and often nauseating.

Mando S3 had IG-12 which probably leaves it in net positive territory overall IMO.

I also think those episodes were excellent, some of the best work SW has done, but you have to watch a LOT to get to that point, and much of it is not great. Think I mentioned somewhere that Clone Wars starts out bleh and gets steadily better and more consistent each season - increasing returns. One of those shows where I'd definitely recommend someone follow a guide and only watch the best/most important episodes

― Vinnie, Thursday, April 27, 2023 7:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, after watching Andor, I was listening to the podcast A More Civilized Age, which primarily focuses on the Clone Wars, but took a 12-episode detour into Andor. They kept dropping Clone Wars character references and plot points in the Andor episodes so I decided to revisit it. I had watched a season or so when my son was a kid. I even found a list of the "essential" story arcs somewhere, trying to avoid getting bogged down. Still couldn't hang with it.

The sticking points for me were: 1.) the animation style, which has never sat right with me; 2.) the numerous gruff New Zealand accents all sounding very samey; and 3.) the presence of battle droids - "roger, roger" and all that insipid humor.

Mando S3 had IG-12 which probably leaves it in net positive territory overall IMO.

I believe you mean:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Cool News: Tony Gilroy, creator/writer of @starwars #Andor, just announced that they are launching a website soon with all 12 scripts & tons of concept art - all free to read!

He worked really hard on his scripts & is proud of the way they turned out- they are production drafts. pic.twitter.com/LbXEOdumaZ

— Jeff Goldsmith (@yogoldsmith) May 1, 2023

LFG

whoa, had no idea. First heard of Gilroy a few days ago while watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpAE7wgP8oA

Andor is Also Resuming Production During the Writers Strike https://t.co/HmhaXkL3d9 pic.twitter.com/H4dLXPVz6V

— io9 (@io9) May 6, 2023

boooo

Yeah that seems tricky at best, even beyond the 'this is a bad look' factor.

It does, tho it sounds like Gilroy and other showrunners are in sort of a tight spot there.

We actually just finished the series last night — been watching it with one of my kids, so it took a while to have time when we could all watch together. We all liked it a lot and agreed it's definitely the best Star Wars of the modern era. We're going to rewatch Rogue One tonight.

Good read:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/andor-broke-star-wars-rules-reinvent-sci-fi-tv-1235507880/