The False Security of Franchise Storytelling

I’ve been into Star Wars since I was five. A babysitter showed me and some friends the original trilogy, and I’ve been a fan ever since. Of course, fandom is a spectrum, and it varies over time. I never read any of the Star Wars novels, but I did play Shadows of the Empire on Nintendo64, so I know who Dash Rendar is. I dutifully saw the release of the Prequel Trilogy, but I didn’t make my way over to The Clone Wars or any of the other animated series. I saw the Sequel Trilogy, and have endeavored to keep up with the live-action series despite their varying levels of quality.

That streak of watching live-action Star Wars shows ended last week when I skipped Ahsoka. Although the character of Ahsoka Tano (played in live-action by Rosario Dawson) previously appeared in episodes of The Mandalorian, she goes back to The Clone Wars series (voiced by Ashley Eckstein) and its sequel series, Rebels. For Ahsoka to receive her own show, it’s basically a reward for the die-hard fans who stuck with dozens of animated episodes, and now she has her own series. For the die-hards, that’s great. But for the casual Star Wars fan who hasn’t watched 133 episodes of Clone Wars and 75 episodes of Rebels, early reviews of Ahsoka’s first two episodes say there’s nothing for you here.

We won’t know Ahsoka’s viewerships numbers because streaming services keep that data private, but I wonder if it will face the same fate as other new installments of long-running series. Both Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny are going to struggle to make back their budgets, partly due to the high cost of production, but also because audiences are now wary about dropping in for the latest installment of series that are at least 25 years old. While neither film’s plot is particularly dense or rely on complicated mythology (they’re both basically MacGuffin chases), at some point the audience wonders if it’s really worth the lift.

Which brings us back to Ahsoka, and the desire to appeal to the most devoted of Star Wars fans. For Disney, they may think this is a wise move since they can count on those devoted fans, but a fanbase that isn’t growing is one that’s arguably stagnating. Studios are sticking to their franchises, but in the most cautious way possible. Nothing reinvents the wheel, and for something like Ahsoka, you’re essentially coloring in the gaps. It’s great to see returning characters, but we’ve also seen there’s a lot of carelessness with these shows as middle chapters.

For example, Obi-Wan Kenobi meeting Leia when she’s a little girl in Kenobi doesn’t make a lot of sense when her message to him A New Hope is, “You fought with my father in the Clone Wars.” You can retcon it in your mind that Leia is being humble and not drawing upon her personal adventure with Obi-Wan when she was a kid, but that doesn’t really fit with what we know about Leia, a rebel who wouldn’t hesitate to draw upon the most powerful emotional connection possible if it meant bringing down the Empire.

What we see here is a fake sense of security: “Look! It’s Obi-Wan! Look! It’s Ahsoka! They’re going on adventures, but don’t worry! These aren’t movies, and these events are basically prequels to other stories, so the endpoint is fixed. We would never risk taking a franchise, and doing something new that people may dislike.”

But I think audiences are getting tired of safe storytelling in these walled gardens. They’re essentially being asked to do homework, and even if you boil it down to the ten episodes they say to watch on StarWars.com, you’re still dumping in about five hours before you feel comfortable pressing play on Ahsoka. If you think of movies and television only as content blocks, then this is great. You think someone will spend five hours on Disney+ before watching the new Star Wars show, but that’s not how it works in reality.

You also can’t have it both ways where you’re making a show created with a devoted fanbase in mind but also expect neophytes to just come along unless the material is outstanding (and reviews of Ahsoka indicate that the show is great for the devoted fanbase, and perhaps not enough for everyone else). The whole appeal of IP and franchises to studios is a built-in audience. But Star Wars shows that there are levels of audience engagement, and you can’t take everyone along for the ride every time, especially if, as Disney desires, you keep cranking out so much stuff that there’s no way to catch up and the act of following along starts to feel like work (see also: the Marvel Cinematic Universe).

To Lucasfilm’s credit, they have an eye on the future where there are shows coming that presumably don’t require previous knowledge like the forthcoming The Acolyte and Skeleton Crew. But as we’ve seen with showrunner Dave Filoni’s increased influence on the franchise, he’s big on making sure his work on Clone Wars and Rebels makes the jump to live-action. That’s a nice payoff for those who stuck with Star Wars when it was animated, but it also shows that we’ve reached a point where, like a lot of franchises, the world is getting smaller because the folks running the show decided there are a finite number of important characters.

While there’s a temptation to simply put the onus on the viewer—if you want to watch Ahsoka, then simply watch the animated series, or the most essential episodes, and quite whining—that idea rests on the notion that the franchise cannot fail the audience; the audience can only fail the franchise. Furthermore, this deepening reliance where franchises only burrow deeper into pre-established stories leave the larger setting feeling barren, as if it only springs to life when noted characters stroll through it. Without new stories, whether within the larger franchise or just (gasp) taking a chance on something that isn’t based on IP, our entertainment landscape becomes as dry and lifeless as the surface of Tatooine.