Star Wars: Andor (September 21st, 2022)

Collector Freaks Forum

Help Support Collector Freaks Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
The Nielsen ratings have been released for the third week of Andor. They're awful. Despite having 5 episodes available, the viewership dropped from 485 million minutes viewed the previous week (with 4 episodes) to 356 million.

I said that I wanted to wait to see the trendline compared to the other shows because I expected a much better retention of audience and eventual pickups. I was dead wrong. Not only did the audience fail to grow from Week Two to Week Three, but it actually shrank by more than 25% with an extra episode to pad the total. That's just horrendous.

What a complete bummer. If there isn't some sort of dramatic audience turnaround, I can't see this sort of tone and overall storytelling getting much future support from LFL/Disney. It irritates me to no end because this show isn't doing any of the things that so many fans had been complaining about with Disney Star Wars, and yet fewer of them are watching from week to week. The better I think the show gets, the smaller the audience gets. :(
Personally it's typical Disney over correction for me. They've gone too far in the opposite direction to shows like Boba Fett etc.

For me it's also just too slow. Even the frigging Andor title takes forever to appear. The heist to get the wages would have taken them one episode in any other show. I'd bet that's why viewership numbers have dropped off.

For me pacing somewhere between Rebels, and Andor with more adult "deeper" writing would be the sweet spot imo.
 
I’m totally ok that Khev hasn’t posted his thoughts on this episode yet…
:lol

I'm still processing the surreal experience of watching a series that is this good.

Andy Serkis' about-face on numbering the guards is one of the single most awesome moments in all of SW.

In prior episodes I was actually rooting for Dedra to prove herself and now after Bix interrogation I hate her and want to watch her coming crashing down, lol.

I love how they incorporated the tone and aesthetic of THX-1138 into this universe and future viewings of the OT and RO will forever be enhanced as a result of this show.
 
I do wonder if either or both Syril and Dedra were to bite the dust, I feel it would be at the hands of each other rather than Cassian.
 
A lot of "casual" star wars fan were weary of watching the show because they have been burned by the lack of quality in both boba fett and obi wan, i had to convince some of my friends to watch it and some still haven´t seen it yet.
it was also set up against strong competition with Hotd being better than most expected, myself included
at least the show makers said it will wrap things in season 2 and that season is very well into production so we will have a complete story.
 
Someone posted this on Facebook with the caption "No lasers, no lightsabers, no space battles...and still 100% Star Wars."

andor.jpg
 
Personally it's typical Disney over correction for me. They've gone too far in the opposite direction to shows like Boba Fett etc.

For me it's also just too slow. Even the frigging Andor title takes forever to appear. The heist to get the wages would have taken them one episode in any other show. I'd bet that's why viewership numbers have dropped off.

For me pacing somewhere between Rebels, and Andor with more adult "deeper" writing would be the sweet spot imo.
I get that the slower pacing might be off-putting for SW, but I expected more people to start appreciating the entirely different approach as something refreshing and ultimately rewarding. Once the setups started getting paid off, I thought that would convince more people to just sit back and savor the well-written dialogue, outstanding acting, amazing set design and costumes, and richly-textured storytelling.

I think pacing can be easy enough to adjust to, one way or another, as long as the quality is high. I can enjoy a good comic book but also be able to love reading a thick novel, and have tons of both on my shelves. Andor is more like a great novel than any other SW before it. If it was a poorly-written one, or was all setup with no payoffs, then yeah, I could understand more people tuning out, especially kids. But damn, it's hard for me to relate to how this particular show could be considered so unsatisfying to so many that viewership would drop significantly from one week to another.

It's not just that people weren't tuning in because of being burned repeatedly by Disney SW (or any other reason). It's that plenty of people who *did* tune in and gave Andor a shot didn't want to stick around after 4 episodes. I'll take your testimony about pacing as the answer to why people got turned off, but I still hope the show wins many back over time.
 
I continue to feel really conflicted about this show. There are so many amazing scenes and performances in every episode, and yet the whole thing still gets pretty damn tedious at times (how many of these giant cogs do we really need to watch Cassian's team build?) and I'm not sure how much I really care about any of it.

Ultimately, even with the more adult tone and style, I think the underlying story could have been sped up a bit more and didn't need to be drug out quite this long.
 
Someone posted this on Facebook with the caption "No lasers, no lightsabers, no space battles...and still 100% Star Wars."

View attachment 606410
This reminds me: Before Vel showed up, was I the only one who thought that Mon Mothma's cousin might be Dedra? Between the editing and the look on MM's face when she was told her cousin was there, I thought they did a good job building/maintaining the tension. Speaking of those two, I think Genevieve O'Reilly and Denise Gough are both killing it.
 
I had a rant over on the Tales of The Jedi thread how amazing the writing and tone of that is (except the first ep is on the nose - in fact, just skip it) and how Lucasfilm are an unmitigated mess. It's a damn cartoon and still has the adult themes we're seeing here - but it does include the "action" as well.

Zero comedy. Zero silliness. And some heavy stuff going on.

There's only six episodes and they're only 13 minutes long, but they answer things you didn't know you wanted answering. Even if you're not into cartoons (I'm not), they're worth a watch if you're enjoying Andor.

Warning though, it will make you pull your hair out in frustration at the bizarre lack of consistency at Lucasfilm.
 
Lucasfilm needs their own Feige too because Kathy Kennedy has made a balls of the franchise since 2015, apart from hiring Tony Gilroy and Jonny Favs.

I don't know about having their own Feige. Because right now, I don't trust Feige with the way phase 4 is going. I also don't want it ending up being formulaic.
 
Feige shot himself in the foot by ending Stark and Rogers's arcs. What we have now in no way compares to the greatness that they brought.

Every studio needs a studio head that picks the right people and plans ahead. Lucasfilm hasn't had one, and they're throwing things at a wall to see if it sticks, same as DC.

DC now has James Gunn so there is hope, but with Gilroy finishing up supposedly after Andor s2, Star Wars quality will drop again unless they keep him around and promote him to an overseeing role.
 
Back
Top