Exactly. You hear the basic conceit, the broad swaths, the time period, the setting, the aim, etc, and you can't help but find it interesting, if not exciting. So much can go wrong from there, though.

This does not apply to everyone in the thread, but some of you clearly dont like the show and seemingly hate it.
Why would you keep watching it and posting in the show thread?

PatAg said:

---

This does not apply to everyone in the thread, but some of you clearly dont like the show and seemingly hate it.
Why would you keep watching it and posting in the show thread?

---

why do people keep watching Aggie Football each fall after decades of mediocre or poor play

C@LAg said:

---

PatAg said:

---

This does not apply to everyone in the thread, but some of you clearly dont like the show and seemingly hate it.
Why would you keep watching it and posting in the show thread?

---

why do people keep watching Aggie Football each fall after decades of mediocre or poor play

---

True, but I would say people probably dont viscerally hate Aggie football.
I guess the takeaway is its just fun to complain, just think they should take that to the main Star Wars thread and this could be actually discussing the episodes.

Quote:

---

True, but I would say people probably dont viscerally hate Aggie football.

---

Have a look at the zoo around November.

Cliff.Booth said:

---

I didn't say *I* was the dude in that room, but there HAD to have been some equivalent of TC listening to it being pitched and being like **** this is going to lose money and get canceled.

---

without question

and anyone with at least a decade of management in corp world, real corp world, knows this

Cliff.Booth said:

---

Quote:

---

True, but I would say people probably dont viscerally hate Aggie football.

---

Have a look at the zoo around November.

---

If your goal is to make this thread like the zoo in November, you are succeeding

I don't hate Aggie football, marvel, and star wars but they are all achieving a level of mediocrity/badness that I'm becoming purely apathetic about all of them.

I still always have a sliver of hope. At least Marvel had years of awesomeness but can't say the same for SW/Aggie football outside of original trilogy and Manziel.

The Star Wars and Aggie football analogy is eerily spot on. All the money and resources for success but they continue to **** the bed. Star Wars has thousands of years of material to explore and create original stories or even use great books that have already been written but just keeps falling on its face.

I have watched every movie in the theater. Have watched every tv show. I grew up with and care about the franchise. That is the only reason why I continue to watch this show. It is objectively bad. It is cringey, boring, and illogical. I find myself yawning through the episodes or rolling my eyes. I will watch the rest of this show just to know the full story for canon purposes and then never watch it again. I always hold out hope for good star wars content and have been happy with several projects in the past 5 years like Mando and Andor. But this show is pretty much hot garbage so far.

TCTTS said:

---

You can't know until you know. Headlund is ALSO a proven Star Wars super-fan who would run circles around most people in this thread in terms of Star Wars knowledge. Considering her objective talent as well, all signs pointed to her knocking this out of the park. So the only thing that makes sense to me for the stinker we've gotten so far is the Lucasfilm development process. Yes, Headlund obviously has a big part in that for sure, but there's also 100% something else systematic at play, that has nothing to do with "woke" and everything to do with the creative development process.

---

I find it hard to believe that it's a systemic problem at Lucasfilm after Andor, which is, IMO, some of the absolute greatest TV ever made. I mean the last several episodes just kept reaching new heights every week and I could watch Luthen and Maarva's monologues over and over and over again because they're just so ****ing good, but everything else Star Wars since season 2 of Mando is just completely forgettable and every Star Wars movie made by Disney except Rogue One is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.

On second thought, maybe it is Lucasfilm and Tony Gilroy just rises above it. I dunno.

ABATTBQ11 said:

---

TCTTS said:

---

You can't know until you know. Headlund is ALSO a proven Star Wars super-fan who would run circles around most people in this thread in terms of Star Wars knowledge. Considering her objective talent as well, all signs pointed to her knocking this out of the park. So the only thing that makes sense to me for the stinker we've gotten so far is the Lucasfilm development process. Yes, Headlund obviously has a big part in that for sure, but there's also 100% something else systematic at play, that has nothing to do with "woke" and everything to do with the creative development process.

---

I find it hard to believe that it's a systemic problem at Lucasfilm after Andor, which is, IMO, some of the absolute greatest TV ever made. I mean the last several episodes just kept reaching new heights every week and I could watch Luthen and Maarva's monologues over and over and over again because they're just so ****ing good, but everything else Star Wars since season 2 of Mando is just completely forgettable and every Star Wars movie made by Disney except Rogue One is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.

On second thought, maybe it is Lucasfilm and Tony Gilroy just rises above it. I dunno.

---

I'm pretty sure you just made the argument that Rogue One and Andor are anomalies and the bulk of Disney Stars is average at best....soooo, it it likely is a systemic problem in Disney/Lucasfilm

You know the screen writing rule that you never show a gun unless its going to go off?

New rule: Don't show us a wookie Jedi unless you are going to show him fight.

I continue to have the same complaints: what characters are we supposed to like? what is motivating any of them? In this episode both of the twins switched their motivations up on a whim and we are just supposed to go with it. And Sol is interesting, but the show is doing its best to keep his motivations so shrouded in mystery that he even does the HATED dialogue fail, "I'll explain everything later, even though we are on an hours long walk and this would be a really good time to give you the information you need, I will wait, because we need to tease this out for 2 more episodes!"

Darth Teeth (as the internet is calling him) had a cool intro in this episode. Maybe would have been better to hold his reveal until now, instead of the beach reveal in episode one.

I agree that something has to be totally off in the development process of these shows. The idea of the show was very interesting to me, and what we got is nothing at all what I thought by the initial description. I was thinking Game of Thrones type of subterfuge on Coruscant, something much more akin to a political thriller. But that would mean the people at Lucasfilm were willing to do something interesting with the franchise and take it into new genres/spaces.

What I really think is the problem is that they have too many audiences they are trying to please with each show. They want to make stuff that is kid friendly, but also interesting to the adult fans who have been with the franchise since the beginning, and also try to rope in NEW fans in different demos. So we end up with this kind of bland, tonally confused, mess.

Andor is great, but I know people whose kids think that show is boring. "Too much talking". So perhaps Lucasfilm needs to just focus on one audience they want for its shows, and then hope there is another crossover appeal, or that one is a breakout hit, instead of trying to do it all every time. Anyway, thats my $0.02

I get what he's saying and it is close to something I was trying to point out. TC was likely right that making the right movie/series in those conditions is tricky, but that's why it takes the right kind of person with the right vision and some spine to make a great series SW fans will love. Leslye pretty much straight up said she wanted to make the kind of SW material herself as a teen would have enjoyed and...maybe she has, but damn. That's about as self-centered and narrow minded as it gets. The goals of anyone touching this material should be a) stay true to what Lucas started b) excite as many fans, young and old, as possible c) make a product that adds to the universe but also stands alone as great filmmaking. That's ambitious, but fans deserve it, it can and has been done, just rarely under Disney because their priorities are ****ed.

I hold to my belief that the larger tentpole films need to adhere to that tried and true Star Wars look/feel/rules/worldview held by the larger fanbase that's been around for decades. While the TV shows explore new territory with new styles, etc. But the problem may very well be that Disney/Lucasfilm is trying to please all audiences all the time instead of letting the shows appeal to niches in the Star Wars fanbase.

Nothing about Acolyte looks like it wanted to please all audiences. That's what the prequels seemed to shoot for, and they weren't great, but in comparison they were passable. I've brought this concept up in other threads, but if your audience is "niche", your budget better be modest. Disney keeps spending blockbuster money to make stuff most of their audience doesn't want.

Ok, but Leslye herself didn't say this was for everyone. She said it was for her as a teenager, and it feels like it.

FL_Ag1998 said:

---

I hold to my belief that the larger tentpole films need to adhere to that tried and true Star Wars look/feel/rules/worldview held by the larger fanbase that's been around for decades. While the TV shows explore new territory with new styles, etc. But the problem may very well be that Disney/Lucasfilm is trying to please all audiences all the time instead of letting the shows appeal to niches in the Star Wars fanbase.

---

I think the problem is Kathleen Kennedy not understanding how a franchise works and how to keep it successful, and maybe that's the systemic issue.

There's little to no attention and focus on any kind of wider narrative or style or consistency of any kind from the very top. If anything, Kennedy is looking for independent types who want to make their own creations with a Star Wars veneer as opposed to creators looking to make a contribution within a broader picture. Everything is its own independent project, hence the, "You've written a great 'Star Wars' show. Now go write a Leslye Headland show." from Kennedy to Headland on initial Acolyte scripts. Everything coming out of Lucasfilm is first and foremost whatever whoever is in charge of it wants it to be, and having a greater, unified Star Wars vision and narrative takes a backseat.

And to me, that's why we have a Star Wars show that's so terrible. It's not a Star Wars show. It's a Leslye Headland show with some Star Wars in it. This was never meant to please all audiences. You don't hire an activist filmmaker like Headland and tell her to go make her baby if you're trying to please everyone, because you know that's not going happen. The final product ends up being a weird amalgamation or freakishly mutated version of a great Star Wars concept with a creator's own personal politics and self-insertion, and it just doesn't work. Everything is meandering and disjointed and messy because from the outset this show is trying to be a lot of different things in and of itself, not something that's trying to please a lot of different people.

Contrast that with Marvel where creators were given freedom within a much wider and preplanned framework. There was room to work creatively with dialogue and style, but there were a lot of guidelines to keep everything unified across a lot of different movies. What we got were movies that were unique on their own right but also familiar to each other.

And I think there's some room for what you're talking about with experimenting with the shows, but it also needs to be more closely aligned with the Marvel model where you're still operating within a certain framework. You can relax some of the style guidelines, but the content needs to remain pretty true. Look at Rogue One and Andor. They're VERY different from the typical Star Wars, but in terms of content they're very similar. They play into the wider narrative and expand on context, while also delivering on expansions of some of the original themes. They're still very much Star Wars at their core, even though they have a vastly different feel.

I think they need to stop hiring people that are huge Star Wars fans. You don't need to be a huge fan to make a great film/show, you just need to respect the source material.
I think that's a big part of why Tony Gilroy has made great stuff, because hes just good at his job first and foremost.

But I think Rian Johnson is proof that a good director also needs to respect the existing story as well. Because I really like most of his movies, but I truly despise the choices he made.


and Kennedy has to go

It goes without saying that Dave Filoni is an absolutely essential part of the operation. He's the glue, the encyclopedia, The One True Fan, etc. Without him, the whole operation probably falls apart. He also seems like an incredibly kind person and a fantastic mentor.

Which is why it pains me to say - and I know some people aren't going to want to hear this - that, IMO, he shouldn't be the one driving the creative ship or writing any actual scripts. At least not solely. For as knowledgeable and nice and as irreplaceable as he is, I'm sorry, but the guy just isn't a cinematic storyteller, nor does he seem to have anything compelling to say thematically. At least in terms of live action, his "vision" and his output is all just so incredibly vanilla.

To be clear, I think he should absolutely be *the* consultant. Every story and script should go through him, if only to make sure it all fits with canon, isn't contradicting anything, etc. And I'm not saying he doesn't have great ideas (he absolutely does) or that he shouldn't be helping shape the overall narrative (he absolutely should). But he just doesn't have that sixth sense - that *it* factor - to be able to bring those ideas to the (live-action) screen, nor should he be the final voice/ultimate authority.

Going back to my something-systemically-wrong-with-Lucasfilm argument, I truly believe that Filoni's overall blandness and lack of cinematic oomph, for lack of a better term, is a big part of what's "infecting" everything there, outside of the Tony Gilroy stuff. Ideally, Filoni needs a "cinematic" counterpart, someone who not only inherently knows what makes the best movies/shows tick, but understands that character/theme is king...

#TheAcolyte E4 writer Claire Kiechel says Dave Filoni gives notes on all the scripts

"[He] has to ultimately approve them along with the rest of the Lucasfilm team" pic.twitter.com/LVXMCdYnwg

— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) June 20, 2024

I would have argued with you about Filoni based on a lot of the animated material he did actually give it some umph and one of the deaths in rebels was fantastically done along with ashokas confrontation with Vader and some other scenes.

However, after seeing how aimless, boring, and pointless the majority of Ashoka live action was I think he is indeed part of the problem. The dialogue in that show was something painful to behold.