The Miracle of ‘Andor’ Is That It’s a ‘Star Wars’ Story You Don’t Need To Be a ‘Star Wars’ Fan To Enjoy

That Andor, a Star Wars television series on Disney+, received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Drama doesn’t tell you much about Andor. Like all awards shows, the Emmys are ultimately about themselves; following their nominees and winners from year to year is less a way to keep track of what’s actually good and more a way to track the values of the Academy of Television Arts & Science’s values and preferences as they change, or don’t change, over time. For example, the acting on the satirical HBO dramedies Succession and The White Lotus was very good, but please take it from someone who covers this stuff for a living: In no way did these two shows alone contain the eight best supporting actor performances of the year all by themselves, unless they were the only two shows you watched.

Similarly, Andor’s nods for Best Drama, Best Directing, and Best Writing — three of its total of eight nominations — are very nice for Andor, a show acclaimed by nearly every critic from nearly every quarter. But please note that the rote exercise in IP management Obi-Wan Kenobi, aka Ewan McGregor’s Divorce Attorney Needs a New Pair of Shoes, also landed a nomination in the historically competitive Best Limited Series category. Put it all together and what you have is evidence that Emmy voters listen when the Mouse tells them something is For Your Consideration, that’s all. It’s just like how the capture of an entire category by two shows that aired on the same network/streamer in the same time slot on the same night while parodying the same kinds of people tells you more about how Emmy voters like spending their Sundays than anything else.

Fortunately, what Andor’s success in the gold statuette realm really means is that we have another opportunity for us, you and me, to talk about just how good Andor is. 

Andor is a Star Wars story, obviously. Yet it pulls off a weird mind trick: It’s a Star Wars story you don’t need to be a Star Wars fan to enjoy, but which enriches your understanding and experience of the entire fictional universe if you are. Andor, after all, is a prequel to Rogue One, the standalone Star Wars film that starred Diego Luna (returning here as the show’s title character) and Felicity Jones as Rebel agents on a suicide mission to retrieve the plans for the Death Star, the franchise’s answer to the hydrogen bomb.

If you, like me, thought Rogue One was pretty great, this is a pleasure: You learn how Cassian Andor, one of the most hard-bitten, dedicated, and murderous Rebels we’ve ever encountered, became such a believer in the cause, and you get immersed in the nitty-gritty of the Rebellion, far removed from the Jedi vs. Sith conflict that overlays it all. Meanwhile there are still cute droids, weird aliens, villainous Imperials, cool ships, and that whole lived-in retro-futuristic look that’s Star Wars’ stock in trade. If you’re into that galaxy far, far away, you’ll feel right at home.

But unlike so much shared-universe storytelling these days, Andor virtually never relies on the old last-page-of-the-superhero-comic-book technique of treating the return of familiar characters and concepts as massive story beats in and of themselves. With the exception of the season finale’s post-credits stinger, which reveals (spoiler alert) that Andor was making parts for the Death Star during his stint in prison in the season’s back half, I can’t think of any point at which the show expects you to go “holy shit, it’s that guy from the original trilogy/the animated series/the video game!” in lieu of responding to an actual dramatic or character beat. Compare this to Obi-Wan, which did almost nothing but that. 

This is what I mean when I say you don’t need to be a Star Wars fan to enjoy Andor: You just need to appreciate complicated characters forced into action by desperate circumstances, living (or dying) with the choices they make as a result. This is the stuff of drama, not of franchise management; it has more in common with the great canonical New Golden Age cable series than with The Book of Boba Fett.

Andor is also a ferociously political story from start to finish, in a franchise that under Disney control has avoided politics entirely beyond diversifying its cast and conveying the idea “Space Nazis bad.” George Lucas’s acknowledgement that the Empire is America and the Rebels are the Viet Cong, or the parallels he drew between the Emperor and Presidents Nixon and W. Bush respectively, is closer to the mark here. From the early episodes in which Andor dodges a murder rap (unlike most science-fantasy protagonists, he’s really guilty by the way) to the riot that closes it out, the arrogance, incompetence, and brutality of police is a recurring theme, just like it is in the city you live in or are closest to. The dire position of the working class and the laborers it comprises is driven home repeatedly, using characters who are our protagonist’s closest friends and surrogate family. (Related: This essay was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes; without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, from creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy to star Diego Luna on down, Andor would not exist.) 

The show makes the raising of funds for an insurgency by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) — later the beatific leader of the Rebellion, here a legit senator and society doyenne serving as a class and political traitor — a major storyline. Ditto the coldly utilitarian choices about which Rebels live and die made by Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), the nascent Rebellion’s tactical mastermind. Arguably the central story arc is all about how prisoners are viewed as a source of cheap, expendable labor by a state that doesn’t care if they live or die; you can’t swing a firehose at a California wildfire without evidence of that in the here and now.

Fittingly, given its complicated and nuanced treatment of the politics of the universe that gave us Dark Lords and lightsabers, Andor is peopled with idiosyncratic, atypical good guys and bad guys alike, brought to life by actors who received no Emmy nominations themselves. (See what I mean about awards?) This starts with Luna, whose work with the character in Rogue One I found a little bland and flat. Not anymore. Now we see this is a man who’s been thoroughly ground down and gutted by Imperial repression; that he starts the series tantamount to a rat scurrying around nibbling at scraps while hiding from the exterminators is not a bug, as some skeptical critics claimed, but a feature. Gilroy and Luna have repeatedly stated that the show is a story of a man’s political awakening, and thanks to Luna, who can switch his brown eyes from dead to soulful like you and I turn on a car’s headlights, we see that awakening play out in front of us.

But it doesn’t stop with the leading man by any stretch of the imagination. O’Reillly and Skarsgård are riveting as Mon and Luthen, two people forced to smile all day at people they hate while living in fear that their goal of engineering those people’s downfall will be found out and snuffed out. In one of the season’s most memorable moments, we actually watch Luthen practice smiling, smartly filmed by director Susanna White at a remove to drive home the strangeness of this, the unnaturalness of having to perform every time you step outside your door. We also watch Mon, gorgeous and resplendent as ever, choke down her repulsion as she agrees to an arranged marriage for her daughter, a cultural-religious practice from her homeworld she hates as only the lapsed religious can hate religion, in order to secure funds for the Rebellion. Over in another corner of the universe, Fiona Shaw is as good as I’ve ever seen her as Maarva Andor, Cassian’s adoptive mother and the woman whose death inspires a revolution.

And the villains are like none we’ve ever seen in this setting. The primary antagonist is…well, it’s the system, which gets us back to our earlier point about politics. But that system is embodied by two figures: Dedra Meero, a skillful and merciless imperial intelligence officer disregarded by her peers due to her gender; and Syril Karn, a corporate security bootlicker who lives at home with his emotionally abusive mother (!!!) and who destroys his own career by trying and failing to catch Andor. Played by Deirdre Gough and Kyle Soller respectively, these characters exist in part to make political points, about the limits of girlboss-style identity politics within oppressive systems and about the kind of sniveling creep that wants to get involved in law enforcement respectively. But, like assorted supporting captains and soldiers in The Sopranos or grasping nobility in Game of Thrones, they are simply interesting as people. Dedra’s lousy treatment at her job does nothing to engender empathy in her, quite the opposite in fact; Syril’s fixation on her as a magic bullet that will solve all his personal problems, from his cratered career to his psychosexual hangups, is a “men will literally do anything but go to therapy” tweet made flesh.

There’s one last character who bears special mention here, one last performance worth singling out, because that character and that performance give us the single most moving moment in the history of the Star Wars franchise. That would be Andy Serkis, the genius of motion-capture acting, appearing in the flesh as Andor’s fellow prisoner Kino Loy. Kino is the floor manager in the in-house factory where the Empire uses prison laborers; his hopes and dreams extend no farther than keeping everyone in line so he can make it to the end of his sentence. It’s up to Serkis to communicate how the discovery that there is no end to the sentence, that the Empire will be using him and all the other prisoners as slaves until they drop dead, not only shatters his world but is also possibly the only thing capable of taking the shards and forging them into a knife in his hand. True to the character-based realism of the project, Andor realizes he’s no Rebel leader, despite the fact that it’s his name on the marquee; he turns to Kino do rally the mutineering prisoners and deliver the message that there is, in fact, only “one way out” of their plight: revolution and escape. 

(Note that it’s no coincidence this speech occurs at the climax of an incredible action sequence, the prison uprising. The show repeatedly builds to impeccably staged setpieces: Andor’s escape from a police raid, his involvement in a heist at an Imperial outpost, the prison riot, and the final street fight on his home planet: each one is expertly cut and choreographed, with stakes and risks that are easy to grasp at every turn.)

Written by House of Cards’ Beau Willimon, Kino’s speech — his abjection, his fear, his determination, his courage, and above all his solidarity with his fellow human beings — made me cry over Star Wars for the first time in four decades of fandom. I’ve loved this universe since my earliest memories, I will bear a Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo I got when I turned 18 on my arm till my final memories, and even so, it took Andor to make it all real to me. For something so potent and powerful and political, so sharp and and strange and sexy and savage, to make it out of the widget machine that is modern studio film- and television-making is nothing short of a miracle. 

The same can be said of Andor itself. What Tony Gilroy, Diego Luna, and the rest of the writers, actors, and other workers responsible for this show have created is best thing Disney+ has ever aired, and one of the best science-fiction shows ever made. I’m happy it earned all those Emmy nominations, sure. I’m happier that it simply exists.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.