The consensus is in: Disney+'s Andor creator Tony Gilroy delivered a masterful Season 2 of the beloved Star Wars series. We now know why the series achieved such exceptional quality and why Gilroy was exactly the best person to spearhead it.
Star Wars has thrilled audiences ever since Episode IV, and its most well-received entries (like The Empire Strikes Back or Star Wars: Rebels) are widely lauded as exceptional examples of film and TV filmmaking. With Season 2, Andor has cemented its position among the franchise's top entries, with some critics even calling it Star Wars at its best. Eschewing the franchise's lightsaber battles and Force powers allowed Tony Gilroy to tell a nuanced, on-the-ground story of revolutionaries under totalitarian political control, capturing the political implications that always formed the franchise's core.
In a recent interview with Deadline, the showrunner highlighted how Andor was the culmination of specific, lifelong interests in surprisingly terrestrial histories.
Tony Gilroy Channelled 40 Years of Historical Interests Into Andor
Even back to George Lucas' work on the original trilogy, Star Wars was always political. It deals with war and oppression, and the Empire is explicitly totalitarian from its actions to its aesthetics.
While the franchise's political implications have always been present, their impact can be lost among the lightsaber battles, interstellar dogfights, and galactic bestiaries. However, these themes are impossible to lose sight of in Andor, a series that centers on the anti-fascist struggle and the heroes who wage it.
The reason Gilroy navigates these waters so well? It's the culmination of his lifelong interest in these exact historical struggles. As he puts it, Andor was "the opportunity to use all the self-education I’d done over 40 years on history:"
“All of the stuff that had been banging around in my head all these years — Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, Zapata, I got to go deep on. I had no place to put that, and this was like, wow, they want me to do a show that takes place over a five-year period about a revolution and the people inside it.”
Gilroy had four decades' experience digging into the most monumental and history-making revolutions in our world's history. That passion and knowledge give insight into the perils and difficulties of revolution, from the macro-scale strategic decisions to the daily minutia and webs of small choices that keep revolutionaries going.
Keeping the story laser-focused on the struggle and incorporating those multifaceted details was the secret to creating one of the most realistic, layered, incisive series of the era, all set gloriously within a galaxy far, far away.
