3 hours ago
6 
There are plenty of TV shows so dreadful they deserve to be labelled the ‘worst of the year’.
I’m thinking of dreck like The Idol, Mrs Brown’s Boys, Jersey Shore, and whatever that US remake of The Inbetweeners was supposed to be.
However, far too often these days, I think people are too quick to judge a show before it has the chance to properly find its feet.
And I must admit, I’m as guilty as the next fan of getting my pitchfork and flaming torch out when some poorly thought-out series lumbers onto the small screen like the televisual equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster.
With that in mind, though, I think the mob may have been too quick to judge a certain series last year, and we’re probably going to regret it in the future.
I’m talking about The Acolyte, a Star Wars TV show that was cut down by the red-hot lightsaber blade of fan indifference before it even got off Coruscant.
If you didn’t watch it, The Acolyte was set a hundred or so years before the events of the main movies, and it was basically a murder mystery involving Jedi and Sith.
While it was met with decent reviews, it did not land with audiences – the show has a healthy 78% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes but an audience score of just 19%.
But I’ll be honest, I really don’t think that fair. So, as it’s Star Wars Day (May the fourth be with you to those who celebrate), I thought it’s the perfect time to defend this underrated series.
Before I begin, however, we have to address the elephant in the room. A lot of the vitriol directed at The Acolyte comes from a small group online who led a virtual hate campaign against the series and showrunner Leslye Headland.
This involved review bombing, which is part of the reason the series has such a low audience score.
That said, The Acolyte was the lowest-viewed Star Wars show, and a quick search of social media will find plenty of regular people who didn’t enjoy it, so it’s an issue that went beyond the troll community (if that’s a thing).
So why did I enjoy it so much? Well, The Acolyte dared to be different. So much of the franchise’s recent output has revolved around the Skywalkers, the Galactic Civil War, and the legacy of the original trilogy.
That can work – Last Jedi, Andor, and Rogue One prove that – but it’s also a bit tiring and, dare I say, boring, that in a galaxy far, far away, we keep running into the same six or so people.
The Acolyte, then, was a breath of fresh air, set in a new time period with (mostly) new characters. All of which made the show feel exciting and fresh.
Also, The Acolyte’s action scenes were mind-blowing. The show blended the traditional Chinese storytelling format of Wuxia with sci-fi to create something that, while still distinctly Star Wars-y, was still unique and interesting.
Honestly, I think it’s some of the most impressive choreography we’ve seen since Darth Maul’s final duel in The Phantom Menace, and Qimir’s Jedi massacre might be my favourite fight in the entire franchise.
Finally, the most underrated part of the show was the way it depicted the Sith. In the movies, those who fall to the Dark Side have a bad habit of becoming cackling loons or literal monsters (and sometimes both).
That makes the attraction to waving around a red lightsaber a bit odd. Yet the way The Acolyte showed Osha slowly becoming disillusioned with the Jedi helped me understand why people fall.
More than that, it did so while presenting a whole new side to the Jedi, one that was unflattering (covering up a massacre isn’t exactly the behaviour you expect from a noble knight) and made us question everything we knew about the order.
I was looking forward to seeing that idea explored more in season 2. Sadly, though, with the news that Disney cancelled the show, that’s unlikely to ever happen.
Now I’m not going to say pretend The Acolyte was perfect, the pacing was bad, it looked cheap, and the story was weak.
Yet to paraphrase Luke Skywalker talking about his dear old dad, Darth Vader, there was still good in The Acolyte. I could sense it (well, I could see it, it was a TV show).
I wish, then, that the show had been given the time to find an audience and improve.
After all, the annals of TV history are filled with great shows with bad first seasons – Star Trek: The Next Generation, Parks and Rec, and Rings of Power spring to mind.
By cancelling the series, I fear Disney may have robbed us of one of the most exciting stories from a galaxy far, far away and condemned the audience to an eternity on the front lines of the Rebels’ war against the Empire.
And I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t fill me with hope for the future of the franchise.
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