Disney Will Learn The Wrong Lesson From The Acolyte Failure
Now that Disney has canceled The Acolyte, everyone is asking the same question: what will happen next with Star Wars? Most people are hoping that the House of Mouse will learn from the show’s mistakes and create better content in a galaxy far, far away, but I’m sad to say that this isn’t going to happen. In all likelihood, Disney will simply conclude that fans didn’t like the setting of The Acolyte and ignore the genuine problems that held this show back from being great.
It’s Not The Setting, It’s Literally Everything Else
When Disney first announced The Acolyte, the most interesting thing about it was that it was set about 100 years before the prequels. That meant we would see something we had never seen onscreen before: the Jedi at the height of their power. Now that the show has crashed and burned, I fear that Disney will simply assume that fans don’t want any stories set in the High Republic era and ignore that nobody really had a problem with the setting of The Acolyte … they just had a problem with everything else.
Too Much And Too Little At The Same Time
With that being said, what were the real problems with the show outside of all the culture war nonsense? For starters, there’s the one-two punch of simultaneously having very short episodes and very little actual story, which means these tiny runtimes nonetheless felt padded for time.
The blunt truth is that in previous shows like The Clone Wars, the whole story of The Acolyte–the mystery of the twins, the emergence of a new villain, and the revelation of what really happened all those years ago–would have maybe been a three-episode arc, but here it was stretched to eight episodes.
Failed To Be Memorable
Paradoxically, despite Disney giving The Acolyte more episodes than it arguably needed for this thin-on-the-ground story, we didn’t really get much development for all the different characters thrown at us. This could just be a skill issue on my part, but even after watching the whole series, very few of the character names and backstories stuck with me, especially for the people who were just introduced so they could be brutally hacked down a few episodes later.
I was probably supposed to deeply care about their deaths, but it’s tough to shed tears for victims like (checks notes) big head guy, elf girl, and Jedi Planet Fitness.
Action Vs Exposition
And when Disney inevitably cranks out more Star Wars shows (throwing everything against the streaming wall to see what sticks), I can only hope the shows have better pacing than The Acolyte.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with building a show around a mystery, but the halting approach to solving that mystery made the show feel too slow in parts only to get insanely abrupt endings to episodes.
We later get an episode that is nonstop fighting, and while the fight was great, it would have been better if each episode could have blended narrative and action elements so we didn’t have to slog through entire episodes of exposition.
Structural Integrity Needs To Be Reconsidered
If anyone at Disney is listening … I can only hope that they learn that The Acolyte had serious structural issues that go far beyond its High Republic setting. And if those issues are repeated in future Star Wars shows, the franchise won’t survive for much longer.
