The Acolyte Deserved Better

Television takes a backseat on this blog for a variety of reasons.  For starters...I don't like television the way I like movies & books.  TV is a continual effort, and frequently, it's about drawing out the plot.  This isn't true now as much as it was years ago.  I watched shows I really liked like Friends, The Simpsons, and The West Wing become repetitive and too much by needing to have another season, another year to profit in syndication.  That's not really a thing anymore, both because syndication isn't what it once was, and because seasons of television shows are anything but long.  In fact, one could make the argument that the current TV landscape could benefit from extending (a show like Heartstopper was begging for longer seasons to explore side characters like you would've gotten in a different era).  But the point is-I think that they are not well-paced with a central story, and only a couple of shows can handle multiple storylines over multiple years well, without it feeling sloppy.

The other reason I don't like television is that it can end in the middle of its run.  This shouldn't be the case for a book or movie.  In a land of perpetual "IP" and sequels, we can run into situations where an original film feels incomplete because it didn't perform at the box office.  Jim Carrey's take on Count Olaf, for example, demanded a sequel, as did the cliffhanger ending at the end of A Haunting in Venice.  But most of the time, if you are operating under the (correct) rule that a movie must stand by itself, even if the film isn't a hit, you still have it forever.  You can't "undo" a movie because people didn't see it.  This isn't the case, though, with television, where shows will end earlier than the creators wanted, and will be cancelled before we have gotten a resolution, so the series just sits there, never actually over.

That is now the fate of The Acolyte, the latest Disney+ series focusing on the Star Wars universe.  The series viewership was a problem from the beginning, coming in behind the initial run of Ahsoka, as well as the most recent seasons of Andor and The Mandalorian.  Ratings continued to suffer, and by the end of the series, it had what was assumed to be the lowest finale ratings of any Disney+ Star Wars series to date.  The show cost an ungodly amount of money ($180 million), so it makes sense that Disney couldn't take the risk and continue the series beyond the initial run, instead choosing to cancel it, the first Star Wars series that they have run that was intended to have a second season (it ends up on a pretty big cliffhanger involving two characters steeped in Star Wars lore), but didn't.

Here's the deal-I think The Acolyte is a weird situation, because I don't think it's that great.  I was in the middle on my initial review of it, saying that I would be around for another season, but didn't really need one because I wasn't that invested.  The series was predictable, and it lacked both the heart that made the first two seasons of The Mandalorian so exquisite as well as the storytelling ballsiness that made Andor so refreshing.  It was, for my money, better than Ahsoka, Boba Fett, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, and I would've liked to have seen where they were going to go with it, but in my opinion, the show wasn't superb and (as a fan) I'm not heartbroken it's not doing better.

It also didn't deserve the evisceration that it reserved from conservative Star Wars fans online, who were clearly attacking the show primarily because it had a Black female lead playing two key characters, and that there was at least hints of lesbianism in it (seriously, if you have to wonder if a character is a lesbian, they aren't being very overt with it).  This feels like a big part of why Disney cancelled it-because they couldn't convince new fans to give it a chance as MAGA crowds destroyed it online.  This isn't the only time we've seen such attacks-look at movies like The Marvels or the all-female Ghostbusters...these sort of sexist crusades against allowing women in the leads of franchises, particularly women of color, is really disgusting, and makes this all the sadder.

It also feels sad because we're in an environment where a show that might've grown with some legs ends up being cancelled before they can find their audience (or their creative footing).  With the $180 million price tag, Disney can't afford to make a series that looks this good (which it does-it continues to astonish me how every Star Wars film is littered with Oscar-worthy effects & cinematography while every MCU TV series looks visually like garbage), and keep it on to grow an audience, but this isn't the only show of this nature.  Everything from A League of Their Own to Mindhunter has struggled in the streaming universe, because they don't have a couple of seasons (and a full 24-episode season) to gain an audience.  Now-beloved streaming shows like Parks and Recreation and The Office were allowed room to grow an audience (and honestly, were never super big ratings hits in their initial runs), but have made tens of millions in syndication.  Shows like Family Guy and Cagney & Lacey went from being literally cancelled into major successes for their networks.  Streaming's model breaks so many aspects about TV, but an underrated one is that it demands a show be a hit from the start-if you have a model of TV where shows like Breaking Bad and Seinfeld might well have been cancelled for not catching on, you're clearly doing something wrong.  And The Acolyte (and its never to be completed cliffhanger) will be one of the series that will pay the price of that incompetence.