The Acolyte wasn’t good, but it surely did break new narrative floor in Star Wars, a franchise typically haunted by Drive ghosts and endlessly recurring characters. Led by Leslye Headland, the Disney+ collection dared to reevaluate decades-old tropes, unpack the failings of the Jedi Order, and play with the house sandbox setting in new, fascinating methods. However The Acolyte, which starred Amandla Stenberg as twin sisters struggling to search out steadiness within the Drive and Manny Jacinto as a super-sexy baddie, was simply formally canceled.
It received’t get a second season on Disney+, and proper now the worst-behaved members of the Star Wars fandom are celebrating its demise. However whereas The Acolyte’s cancellation stokes the fires of that ongoing tradition warfare, it’s additionally indicative of a a lot bigger drawback plaguing fashionable tv—and streaming providers and rising manufacturing prices are guilty.
The issues of contemporary TV
The rise of a disparate (and costly) assortment of streaming providers changing the essential cable subscription for thousands and thousands of paying clients has drastically modified the panorama of contemporary tv. Again within the heyday of cable TV, there was far much less time between seasons of a typical present than there’s now. Take a look at Breaking Dangerous, extensively thought-about one of the prestigious of status tv exhibits: The final episode of its first season aired in March 2008, whereas the primary episode of the second season picked up nearly precisely a yr later. Now, there are routinely a number of years between seasons—two years elapsed earlier than Home of the Dragon season 2 adopted its predecessor, practically three years handed between seasons 2 and three of The Mandalorian, and the collection finale of Stranger Issues nonetheless doesn’t have a launch window (the final season aired two years in the past, and the following one simply began manufacturing this yr).
That may be a large period of time for an invested viewers to attend, and it could possibly significantly diminish their enthusiasm for a collection—it could possibly additionally lead to them actually shedding the plot, because it’s troublesome to recollect what occurred the earlier season when it’s been a number of years because you final watched it. Plus, it’s powerful to justify a second season when you already know it’ll be in manufacturing for years—there’s no actual purpose to let a present breathe anymore, to let it iron out the primary season’s kinks. If Parks and Recreation was canceled after season one, we’d have by no means gotten one of many funniest scenes in fashionable tv.
Then there’s the price of making status TV, which has skyrocketed in recent times. Amazon Prime’s Fallout collection reportedly value $153M for a single season. By the tip of its run, Recreation of Thrones episodes required about $15M every for manufacturing after beginning at round $6M an episode—and just some years later, its spin-off Home of the Dragon prices “lower than $20m” per episode. With manufacturing prices so excessive, firms need a return on their funding, they usually received’t take “it’s simply the primary season, let it cook dinner” for a solution.
In response to Forbes, estimates place The Acolyte’s value of manufacturing at practically $180M for simply eight episodes, and its viewership was about half that of Ahsoka and 75% lower than The Mandalorian’s. When firms are more and more involved with numbers going up, it’s not possible to justify one other season of a collection that’s so costly to make when its viewership numbers don’t match different exhibits throughout the franchise—and therein lies our ultimate drawback: the franchise.
The Star Wars drawback
Lately, the one “profitable” deviation from conventional Star Wars media has been Andor, the spy-thriller-esque collection starring Diego Luna that’s a spin-off of 2016’s Rogue One. Regardless of it reportedly not having as massive a viewership as The Mandalorian or Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor’s second season is ready to debut someday in 2025. Although Andor technically retreads previous floor like so many different Star Wars collection, it feels extremely recent when in comparison with the opposite exhibits that rely so closely on nostalgia to try to placate older followers. So it’s a welcome shock that Disney determined to bankroll one other season—particularly since there are not any plans for season two of both The E book of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan Kenobi.
However Andor is an exception, not the norm. A selected sect of followers are notoriously immune to perceived modifications to lore or the centering of marginalized of us in Star Wars media, and The Acolyte pissed them off from the bounce: run by a lady, with a Black non-binary lead, lesbian witches, and a blistering tackle the failings of the Jedi, it grew to become the focus of a tradition warfare earlier than it even aired. Each Stenberg and Jacinto spoke out concerning the racist backlash The Acolyte confronted, with the previous even dropping a music that appears to reference the hate lobbed at them. On the time of writing, Stenberg’s newest Instagram submit is full of feedback denigrating them: “Take the L by no means do Star Wars once more,” reads one remark, whereas one other asks, “How does it really feel to have your horrible present canceled, princess?”
Sadly, in an age the place fashionable tv collection are outlined by their massive value tags and (hopefully) larger viewer numbers, a present like The Acolyte had an nearly insurmountable feat in entrance of it with a view to guarantee its survival. If its mere existence hadn’t been used because the catalyst for conversations about “wokeism” in Star Wars, maybe it could have had a preventing probability. However when a contemporary TV collection takes place in a long-running franchise and dares to provide a special form of fan-service, the unhappy actuality is it’ll doubtless function a reminder of how far a fandom nonetheless has to go.