“How do I feel about being rescued by Patton? Well I'd feel prettypeachy, except for one thing. We didn't need to be fuckin' rescued by Patton! Got that?”
-Joe Toye Band of Brothers
Andor, a 12 episode series on Disney + following the radicalization and rise of Cassian Andor of Star Wars: Rogue One fame, is a fantastic TV show in a lot of ways. It’s a serious and grounded story about human beings responding to the boot of fascism, it has a lot of practical effects and grounded filmmaking.
It’s great by any standard really, from acting to pace, to mood, and both the tone and efficiency of its visual visual storytelling, while also being narratively dense.
And that it’s not just great TV, but that it’s great TV set in the Star Wars universe of Disney’s Intellectual Property and Content Creation universe, makes it truly outstanding to many people.
It validates genre in a way not seen since the early seasons of Game of Thrones, but if you didn’t see my FB post, or if you missed the unsubtle title and opening quote, genre storytelling doesn’t need validating.
And listen, yes, this is the most “me” article possible in that I’ve found a way to complain about something that I’ve been demanding happen for most of the last decade, but stick with me here.
Andot is good to great TV, but it also does the most basic thing that all storytelling is supposed to do, it tells a competent story, but since so much escapist content out there has done such a piss poor job of that (the MCU, DCEU, etc.), a C+ looks like an A.
And again, I’m not saying Andor is a C+ TV show, it’s not, it’s as solid an A as you can hope for, I’m saying it’s graded on a curve because of the cultural instilled low expectations of genre, that like it or not still remain in our culture both on the production and consumption sides of things.
Need culture has conquered Hollywood, and the takeaway wasn’t that these fantastic worlds create interesting and compelling environments to tell human stories, it was “blue sky lasers make green dollars”.
So yes, like Tony Gilroy used Star Wars to smuggle in a story about radicalization and rebellion, I’m using Andor to smuggle in a complaint about the pernicious effects of our normalization of the idea of high art, and how it has put an artificial ceiling on what we think we’re allowed to expect out of escapism and genre.
Every single Star Wars, Marvel, DC, etc. movie and show should, baseline, should be as human, honest, and narratively viable as Andor. These things don’t need validating, because they are modes of storytelling, and descriptors of narrative elements, not prescriptions for mediocre banter between exciting but pointless and ungrounded set pieces.
History shows us that comic books started as one thing (comic strips packaged together into magazines because it was cheaper to keep the printing presses running than shutting them down and starting them up again), and became another by way of telling ongoing serialized stories (like adventure comic strips), and this matters here because once you start telling a story, once things start to happen and carry on, then things start to mater.
Things mattering, the emotional and technical continuity of a story, creates space for characters lives to matter as much as their actions, and when characters have a chance to matter, then we have the space to care about those characters and see ourselves, our lives, and the human experience in deeper and more meaningful ways.
You can read a Calvin and Hobbs or Peanuts strip and find a wealth of humanity and simple human truth in those four panels, in observation, in the joy of the punchline, in the facial expression sof the characters, and you cna fall in love with all of it in 4 panels. A comic book is a hell of a lot more than 4 panels.
I say all of this because the comic strip and the comic book are the mode of the narrative, they are the medium, they are a way to tell stories, and while Dilbert might suck (And Scott Adams might be human garbage), it doesn’t mean the whole of comic strips are in turn bound to suck or be that myopic.
I bring all of this up because comics in the late 80s and early 90s are the strongest parallel to the “Andor meets narrative expectations” argument. Comics has always been the, to quote Frank Miller (oh Frank…) “The bastard child of literature”, and so high art has always had an eye out to acknowledge them, or find certain voices that can be the exception that proves the rule that the medium of sequential art as storytelling is immature and low. When someone like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, or Miller himself gets the eye of the the high art crowd (saying nothing about cartoonists working outside of Marvel/DC, telling very different stories… but that’s a whole other thing, a graphic novel is a big comics), the end result of their elevation of the few becomes a condemnation of the rest, and it turn the core.
And that in turn becomes a condemnation and diminishing of what everything else. The humanity, the care, and more so by implication, the emotional investment that you may have in the low art of trash media either doesn’t matter, or by another stretch of implication doesn’t exist because how could real human feelings exist in ‘art’ that hardly qualifies as anything past childish bombast and sexual and violent exploitation of the grotesque human forms on the page?
And yet, from mine and many other people’s lived experiences, comics, trash TV, movies, etc. all of it, is filled tot he brim with moments of real humanity, and narrative that resonates with the human experience. It might not always be great, but when it’s there, it’s at least there, because anyone who has taken any creative writing class knows stories start with characters, and characters are people, otherwise they’re not actually characters… wait for it… they’re just interchangeable costumes and quips, bodies in a formula to fill in the spaces between, and then execute the set piece.
Genre storytelling is dear to people because of the characters, and in turn what they do, and Star Wars is (was? I think still is, with the MCU right behind it) peak genre, and by design. Luke, Leia, Han, they’re what people remember, because they were characters first, and action beats second.
The movies were so popular and created this juggernaut we can’t escape close to 40 years later, because the whole of the experience was memorable, and while I’m at best a Star Wars agnostic, even I understand why they are, and how the imagination and relatable nature of the characters created a permission structure for people to do that most basic of human activities, dream.
And to bring this to a final point, humanity in storytelling, in any storytelling, is the barest minimum, and it’s always been there in genre, because the people making it have generally speaking, always given a shit because they love it, and that’s why genre has never needed elevating, because it’s always been on the same footing as “high art” (because high art isn’t real, it’s a weapon of class distinction).
Andor isn’t good because it dares to be “high art” in a genre setting, it’s good because AFTER it meets the bare minimum of basic storytelling, by taking its characters and itself seriously, it does an excellent job of telling the story it sets out to tell.
TL;DR, the only reason why it’s bold and different is because most of its peers fail to meet expectations.
(And that happens because of the content machine, and profit driven laziness).