Why Star Wars might be better as a TV franchise
As I was binging through all of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels earlier this year on Disney+, a radical, but almost completely rational thought entered my head. If that seems like an oxymoron, it kind of is but I have solid reasoning for it.
It occurred to me that Star Wars as a franchise might be better off as a TV property.
Somewhere in quarantine, George Lucas surely just felt a great disturbance in the force.
What a crazy idea, right? The notion that one of the most popular and successful film franchises of all time that has been part of our cultural zeitgeist for multiple generations, might actually be better served on the small screen than the big screen. Sacrilege!
Yeah, not so much. Not when you look at the past decade of Star Wars as a franchise. Hear me out on this one.
Star Wars is a MASSIVE world. Seriously, there’s not enough time in the universe to dive into the amount of characters, stories and events that span movies, TV shows, books, comic books and games since 1977. Star Wars fans went way past just the Skywalker Saga a long time ago.
That’s why there has been such consternation and disagreement over the direction of the franchise for decades now. First it was those of us that hated the prequels and how different from the original trilogy they were in style, writing and characterization. For many of us, it wasn’t the version of Anakin Skywalker’s story that we wanted to see at the time, for several reasons.
That seemingly changed and turned a corner for many when the Clone Wars movie and series started. Suddenly those prequels that tortured us with Jar Jar Binks and senatorial prattle didn’t look so bad because those stories were getting filled out with details from Dave Filoni’s masterpiece of animated glory. I didn’t watch it live, but I knew plenty of people that did and now that I’ve seen the whole thing, I can appreciate their enthusiasm for all seven seasons of it.
What is it about the Clone Wars that enhances the world of the prequels, though? Is it simply appreciation for Matt Lanter’s version of Anakin, or Sam Witwer’s version of Darth Maul? Is it simply the amazingness of Ashley Eckstein’s Ahsoka Tano, or the animation style itself? All of that probably plays a part, but there’s a much simpler answer to this question.
The Prequel Trilogy is roughly 7 hours total of content across 3 movies.
Clone Wars is roughly 49 hours of content across 133 episodes of television.
When dealing with a massive world like Star Wars that has so many characters and storylines to be explored, it benefits you to have more time to flesh it all out. Not only does this give you the ability to enrich and enhance your character dynamics, it also gives you the opportunity to build your world in many different ways that don’t require you to stick to the same group of characters all the time. Clone Wars isn’t a show about just Anakin, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka battling the Separatists, it’s also a show about Rex, Hevy, Fives, Tup, Cody, 99 and the rest of the clones doing battle for the Republic, and it’s about Padme and the senators dealing with political backstabbing and secret plots, and it’s about pirates and bounty hunters looking to make a living by double crossing both sides, and it’s about planets like Mandalore and Onderon that are filled with people caught in the crossfire of a bloody and lengthy conflict across the galaxy, and it’s about a lot more else as well.
When you have a world this big, you can tell so many stories and build such an expansive universe with 49 hours of television time at 22 minutes a pop. Conversely, if you only have 7 hours of time at an average of 138 minutes a pop, there’s only so much you can do, and the reason you only have that much time is because of the structure of your medium and the audience it’s geared toward. You have a maximum of 2.5 hours to tell your story to a large group of people that all paid between $10 and $15 for a ticket to see it in a theater(or now between $20 and $30 to see it on VOD), and they need to see a complete story from start to finish that doesn’t leave them hanging off a cliff too badly at the end. If you succeed, they might come back for the next one. If you don’t, that’s a potential customer you’ve lost, and Zod forbid it was because your movie was too long for them to stick around for.
The math says that Star Wars is a more complete and fleshed out universe on television because it has time to do what the movies simply can’t. This isn’t just the case for Clone Wars either, it’s also true for the 27.5 hours across four seasons of Star Wars Rebels, and even the 8 episode first season of The Mandalorian that roughly totals out to be more than twice the length of one Star Wars film. When you have more time, you can tell more stories and it doesn’t feel rushed or restricted.
Subjectively speaking, reception for Star Wars on the big screen has been polarizing since the prequels and even more so with the Sequel Trilogy. Prior expectations and hopes from the fandom weighed heavily on those three films and either what they did worked for you, or it didn’t. There isn’t much in-between on this, even though there is absolutely a middle ground, you just don’t hear many fans speak on it as loudly.
The TV shows though? Not much polarization with any of them to be found just yet. Clone Wars had a satisfying finale that got rave reviews, fans are still singing the praises of Rebels and the majority of them can’t wait for Season 2 of The Mandalorian, not to mention the eventual development of Kenobi, which will see Ewan McGregor return as Obi-Wan in live action.
All the sniping, whining, crying, gnashing of teeth and insulting discourse that we see with the movies isn’t really happening with any Star Wars on TV right now. That hardly means everyone loves the shows, but if you’re on social media and you see a fierce debate about something Star Wars related, odds are it’s about Rey, Finn and Poe instead of Ahsoka, Ezra and Mando. You don’t hear much hatred for Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau or Deborah Chow as directors and producers, but people are blaming Kathleen Kennedy, Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams for ruining their childhoods at the movie theater.
So not only does Star Wars have more time and space to build its world on TV, it’s also paying off with majority support from the fanbase who seems to enjoy all the content to this point. Plus, it’s more of a discussion piece when you have new episodes every week for people to chew on and speculate about for the following week as opposed to one movie every two to three years that usually gets someone blocked on Twitter or Facebook for saying the wrong thing in either direction. The case here seems pretty clear, especially now that shows like The Mandalorian are looking as good visually as the movies do with VFX.
Now, all of that being said, do I want Lucasfilm to stop making Star Wars movies? No, I’m not saying that at all and when they get going again on the next ones in development, I’ll be front and center to watch them at a safe theater, or on VOD, or Disney+ when the time comes. Star Wars started as a film franchise and I understand why they would ultimately want to keep it that way. All I’m saying is that maybe we should start looking at those movies truly as “episodes” instead of the major world builders that many of us regard them as. If we want to see one story within the Star Wars universe centered around a particular set of characters, we watch one of the films. If we want to see the world as expansive and developed as it could possibly be, with multiple sets of characters and stories spanning the galaxy, we watch one of the shows. Simple as that, I think.