Can a show that has found difficulty with success on streaming manage to recapture interest on linear broadcasting channels? Andor is hoping so.
The following article is a joint contribution by authors Lorn Conner and Jonas Campbell.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving marks a unique shift in strategy for Disney and Lucasfilm… one that has not been attempted before. If it succeeds, it will be one of the final Bob Chapek efforts to sneak across the line before new CEO Robert Iger has had a chance to fully take over. The Disney+ exclusive show, Andor, is heading for a two-episode appearance on ABC. For Disney, it’s a shot in the dark at drumming up support for a property that is critically acclaimed, well-received by fans, but ultimately cannot find a large audience. Star Wars fatigue or backlash, whichever the case may be, has poisoned the well for Disney’s first attempt at taking a Disney+ exclusive to linear broadcast.
Like Solo before it, Andor is a show that paid the price for the series that preceded it. It struggled to retain an audience after as sluggish start, but paid off in spades for those that stuck with the journey. It’s no surprise that Disney hopes linear streaming will boost excitement and numbers, but only releasing two episodes will doom this effort. If Andor had been more economical in its opening, and if Disney hadn’t been so incompetent in its management of the franchise as aw hole, it might have been viewed properly — as the Star Wars we deserve.
Before George Lucas left Lucasfilm, it was well known that he was working on a Star Wars TV series. Based on some of his comments on the subject, he felt like the traditional broadcast / cable model was too restrictive for what he wanted to accomplish. The budget needed to be too high for network TV, the process would call for involvement from forces outside of Lucasfilm (like advertisers, networks, and other distributors), and stories would have to be formatted to be appealing across a weekly release.
George Lucas’s reputation as a collaborator has been somewhat diminished since around the late 1990s. At some point the project was shelved, but today we get some shadow of that original idea.
#Andor is a piece of SW that we’ve truly never seen before. Takes the rich themes that we all know and love and amplifies them to fresher, darker, angrier, beautiful places. Fucking unreal how special it is. Not just one of the best SW projects, but one of the best seasons of TV. pic.twitter.com/OrJRBdqnpd
— Josh (@joshdwoodbury) November 23, 2022
Tonight at 9pm on ABC, Disney will be airing the first two episodes of Andor in hopes that it will pique the interest of its currently nonexistent audience and pull in viewers to watch the entire series that just finished on Disney+. If you miss it tonight, you can catch both episodes on FX tomorrow at the same time. Your last chance on linear TV will be Freeform on Friday at 9pm.
Of course, for the cord cutters the first two episodes of Andor are now on Hulu and they will remain available until December 7.
This is obviously a large gamble for Disney, who seem to be betting that Thanksgiving audiences will be turning on the TV as a group to find “something” to watch this holiday. The risk here is that while the small handful of Star Wars die hards that are watching the show give it favorable reviews, the general consensus from those fans is that it takes at least three episodes for anything to happen. Just a reminder that Disney is only airing two episodes on ABC, FX, and Freeform.
To quote Dodgeball – “It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off.”
Maybe Disney’s next strategy can be to pay customers to watch the first three episodes, it might be a sounder strategy than spending the rumored $100 million dollar budget and assuming people will watch the slow fizzling out of the greatest pop culture franchise in American history.
Stay tuned to That Park Place and let us know if you will be watching Andor on your regular old broadcast TV. As always, we read your comments and often respond!
