Star Wars Television

Has anyone else got the feeling that a lot of what Disney has done since Solo and TROS has felt sort of claustrophobic and small? I think to make the reality of TV budgets work, you have to write around them, and make the smallness part of the fabric of the show, and there's only so many types of stories you can tell that way.

Something that gets overlooked with Andor (and fair enough, it's clearly the best season of SW TV, or maybe second best if Mando S1 scratches the itch for you better), is how they managed a large but finite budget so much better than some of these other shows. Setting an entire arc inside a prison lets you tell a story that only needs a couple of sets. Embedding with rebel cells that aren't even allowed to know others exist is how you keep two TIE Fighters terrifying. They saved on stuff like alien makeup which, while missed, didn't kill the show's vibe. In addition to being a great script, it was also a very clever production.

By contrast, cramming the entire Jedi order into three rooms at the temple and a fiberglass Disneyworld queueing area makes it feel cheap and small and just highlights any issues with the dialogue and acting (which were not much worse than the stilted garbage that GL pulled out of Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp, and Natalie Portman, tbh).

In other shows, I'm super happy for the cosplay gods whose Stormtrooper armor is good enough not to be visually distracting, but grabbing a dozen of them to save on kitting out the extras and/or CGI, and all to cram an action sequence into a Volume soundstage looks psychologically underwhelming even when it's technically impressive to pull off what they do manage. When the fate of the Galaxy is at stake, that dissonance is very distracting.

I'm generally easier on Disney SW than some people, but this an area that has increasingly started to grate on me. It's even more infuriating that I can't quite place the exact spot where it turns for me, but there is a distinct feeling I'm getting that their ambitions are outstripping the resources made available. If you can't make an epic setting feel epic, then just... wait... or animate.