Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Mike Redmond | News | April 8, 2025
I’m going to be completely transparent: I am guilty of everything that Tony Gilroy is about to say in the pull quote below. During my Andor Season 1 recaps, and in the years since, I have not been quiet about how the show is light years ahead of The Mandalorian in every conceivable way: Writing, acting, set design, you name it.
Andor is a richly dense masterpiece while The Mandalorian is, I dunno, a bag of Doritos. I’m not alone in this thought, as Gilroy has noticed and taken issue with. He actually has nothing but love for The Mandalorian and understandably so. If that show hadn’t fired out of the gate so strongly, Andor would never exist. Period.
Via Empire:
“The success of The Mandalorian gave us the platform to jump off,” Gilroy explains. “Their success is what would fuel the whole thing. I mean, no Baby Yoda, no Andor. Seriously. Don’t think that we don’t know that.” While Mando and Andor are poles apart tonally, the projects exist in symbiosis - not in opposition, as the Dark Side of Star Wars fandom might choose to believe. “Online, [people] try to drive a wedge all the time between us, and [Jon] Favreau and [Dave] Filoni,” says Gilroy. “It’s horrible what people say; it’s terrible. And the truth is, we don’t have a show without them. They gave us the muscle to go.”
Fortunately, Andor is wrapping things up in Season 2 because just as The Mandalorian giveth, so does it taketh away. Yes, Baby Yoda launched a streaming rocket that Disney immediately bet the entire franchise on, but that rocket has already come crashing down with fiery results. No Star Wars series has matched The Mandalorian numbers, and the latest series, Skeleton Crew, was left twitching in the crater.
Ironically, Andor was the start of the viewer decline, but not because of that show’s quality. Audiences were burnt out by The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, prompting them to bounce off of Andor’s admittedly slow start. (It wasn’t that bad, and I seriously cannot recommend the show enough in case that message isn’t coming through loud and clear.)
Of course, the state of the franchise is not lost on Gilroy, who explained why a show like Andor will never happen again. My man struck while the Baby Yoda iron was hot, and we are richer for it.
“Not because we’re so great, but because no one’s ever gonna start a show on this scale again, and shoot it practically, and have the resources and the protection to do something like this.” he told Empire. “Kathy [Kennedy] protected us. Lucasfilm protected us. Bob Iger protected us. The audience protected us. The Mandalorian protected us. We had all these people out there backing our play.”
Andor Season 2 premieres April 22 on Disney+.
