Star Wars: The Acolyte Deserved Better
The Star Wars series was cancelled too soon.
The Star Wars universe was dealt a surprising blow on Monday, with reports indicating that Star Wars: The Acolyte has been cancelled after only one season. The eight-episode Disney+ series brought the saga's High Republic Era of storytelling into live-action, while also easily being one of the franchise's most female-fronted, diverse productions both in front of and behind the camera. This has made the news of The Acolyte's demise all the more heartbreaking — and illustrated that, in the modern television landscape, it deserved a much better fate than it ultimately got.
In one of her very first interviews about The Acolyte, series creator Leslye Headland compared the series to a "tent revival" in the "religion" of Star Wars, indicating that it would find ways to challenge fans' expectations of what the franchise could offer. Heck, the show even made headlines prior to its debut for staffing a writer who hasn't never seen Star Wars, in order to ensure that the series was still impactful without an encyclopedic knowledge of franchise lore.
Your personal mileage on the end product of The Acolyte, and the way that its flashback-oriented murder mystery unfolded, may have varied. But it is undeniable that the series offered a lot — characters who instantly became fan favorites, ambitious fight sequences, a much-needed dose of romantic and sexual tension, and new ways of framing concepts from the larger franchise. (The fact that those elements are immediately getting book and comic spinoffs proves that there is more to explore, even if it's — unfortunately — not in the series itself.) Unfortunately, you might not know that from the conversation that surrounded The Acolyte, both prior to and while new episodes debuted on Disney+. In addition to review bombing about the series' diverse elements, some viewers held the show to increasingly-higher — and sometimes bordering on nonsensical — standards regarding the Star Wars canon. A blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance from a younger version of lesser-known established Jedi Ki-Adi Mundi in The Acolyte's fourth episode led to an avalanche of vitriol and death threats in the name of "defending canon", even though nothing about the cameo thematically counteracted his role in the Prequel Era.
The Acolyte's season (and now series) finale was also dominated with chatter about popular characters who barely had anything to do with prior episodes of the show. Some of these reveals had potential for Season 2 and for the larger franchise, like the twist that the infamous Sith Lord Darth Plagueis has seemingly been the secret master of Qimir (Manny Jacinto). The series' very last scene, of Vernestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson) confiding in Yoda, could have potentially led to a Season 2 story arc exploring the iconic character's earlier days as a flawed politician and Jedi as well. Headland confirmed that she deliberately wanted these cameos in the finale, but it is still disappointing, in hindsight, that the show had to balance the arcs of its own characters with future arcs that ultimately never came to pass. Sure, The Acolyte is far from the first or last show of the modern streaming era to have such a fate, but the show occupied a different space between the extremes of ongoing adventures like Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Star Wars: Ahsoka and miniseries like Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett.
The cancellation of The Acolyte also begs the question of what kind of stories will be told in the Star Wars galaxy in the near future. The modern Star Wars franchise has already been criticized for retreading too many moments in the franchise's canon, whether in the form of showing yet another character's POV during the Prequel Trilogy's Order 66, or in the cramped timeline of The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and the forthcoming Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Outside of James Mangold's in-development movie about the origins of the Jedi, the movies that have been recently confirmed by Lucasfilm fall into a similar pattern, either directly continuing the "Mandoverse" story or delivering an arguably-too-early follow-up to the Sequel Trilogy. Along the way, an ever-growing number of announced Star Wars projects, which could have begun to better diversify the timeline of the stories sold, have ultimately fallen apart due to creative differences along the way.
It has not been confirmed that the High Republic Era will be further explored in another live-action series or potential movie, and any adaptation of the fan-favorite Old Republic Era has been languishing in development for at least half a decade. We know that, in one way or another, more Star Wars movies and shows will inevitably be on the horizon, as the franchise remains a bonafide crown jewel in the Disney portfolio. It would be a shame if The Acolyte's fate creates an apprehension to set those future installments in eras that audiences haven't fully explored yet, and instead leads to more of the same. The tapestry of Star Wars has become expansive enough to earn a "tent revival" or two — here's hoping The Acolyte won't be the last one.
The first season of Star Wars: The Acolyte is available to stream exclusively on Disney+.
