Back in the late 2000s, before Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, rumors were flying that some kind of Star Wars live action TV show was in the works. In those days this was a novel and exciting idea: what would you get if you took the long-form episodic structure of TV’s golden age and set it in George Lucas’ world?
Via Disney, we now have our answer: a splatter across a very broad wall, with tone and quality as the wall’s axes. It’s too much for me to keep up with.
Anyway, knowing nothing of what was to come, I got excited and wrote a spec script. I incorporated the rumors I’d heard and made up the rest. There wasn’t much. The show was to take place between the first and second trilogies, would be more ‘adult’ in nature, and might feature Boba Fett or Shaak Ti, an obscure Jedi from the prequels.
I am of the generation that grew up with the original trilogy. It had a huge influence on me as a child. At the time I wrote this I felt that there must be a large audience of people like me who grew up with the movies, but whose tastes had matured and who would love to see more complex human issues tackled in the universe they still partially inhabited. I tried to write a show that expanded and enriched the Lucas’ creation without violating what was already there, while adding some grey area between the Light and Dark. Eventually, the Mandalorian did the former while Andor beautifully accomplished the latter.
In my version, the Jedi have nearly been destroyed; it follows that the few who remain might be tempted to abandon their principles in their desperation to save the last remnants of their order. Meanwhile, the new Empire is encroaching on everyone…