Russian Doll co-creator Leslye Headland is probably not the first creator fans would’ve placed in the showrunners’ chair for an upcoming Star Wars series, but The Acolyte is on its way. There’s not a ton of information about the show, and it hasn’t even started filming yet, but there is one important detail about the series that clearly sets it apart.
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The Star Wars timeline, as depicted in the films so far, takes place over the course of around 67 years. Time is divided into calendar eras, not unlike our Before Common Era and Common Era, known as Before Battle of Yavin (BBY) and After Battle of Yavin (ABY). The Battle of Yavin happens in A New Hope, the prequel trilogy starts about thirty years before that, then the sequel trilogy takes place over the following thirty. The franchise has occupied this relatively brief period, with fairly substantial gaps of unexplored territory, but there are near-constant references to times long past. If there ever is another sequel trilogy, the franchise will likely develop further into the future, but there’s so much implied history to explore. Headland’s new series The Acolyte is set to be the franchise’s first dive into the distant past, and that’s a brilliant direction to take Star Wars in.
One of the biggest problems of Star Wars is the determined and unbreakable focus on a tiny handful of marketable characters. The entire franchise is locked to the Skywalker family, a bloodline of successive chosen ones who must play some role in every Star Wars story. Whether it’s the lead character role, a supporting mentor-type appearance, or a completely out-of-place cameo, they always have to be around. Other mainstays can take the focus, but they just work as separate symptoms of the same issue. There aren’t any Skywalkers in Solo, because that entire film is an exploration of a different marketable character. Somehow Luke still makes his way into Boba Fett’s only solo project, no matter how distracting his appearance is. The franchise is chained to them, and the only way to leave them behind is to set a new Star Wars story in a time period wherein the important characters do not exist.
The Acolyte is set in the High Republic Era, a period of time that has only received a name and some detail in recent years. The only marketable characters that are likely to be alive at the time are characters with inconceivable lifespans like Yoda. Basically, no elements of that period have actually been depicted, but a few have been mentioned off-hand. Fans of the Star Wars movies could reasonably look over a list of the events of the period and come away with little to no new information. Some fans understand every aspect of the canon, some would claim to know better than the creators. Setting the story in a period that stands as a blank canvas allows a creator to run wild with no fear of enraging the fan community’s need for continuity.
The setting is extremely important to any story, but in a universe like Star Wars, there are a few that the franchise can’t stop returning to. Almost every entry of the franchise finds the time to make landfall on Tatooine, the planet that started it all. The Book of Boba Fett is set almost entirely on that desert planet. The Acolyte, thanks to its new setting, will likely have no reason to return to fan-favorite locations. Tatooine will likely be completely unrecognizable, as will other famed locations like Yavin-4 or Kashyyyk. Whether the idea was Headland’s or someone else’s, it’s a brilliant counter to the biggest problem with Star Wars and with franchise media in general. It’s almost playing the game with a handicap, deliberately restricting the franchise’s worst impulses and easiest tricks to create a better project overall.
The marketing has been sparse for The Acolyte, aside from the basic information and the logo there isn’t much to go off of. The big red flag will be ads promising to show off the early version of fan-favorite characters and concepts. Hopefully, this represents Disney and the Star Wars brand finally doing what every savvy fan has long hoped they would do. Anything with the Star Wars label is guaranteed some solid returns on investment, so why not just let creative people do new things with the universe people love. It’s only by letting people experiment that someone came up with Star Wars in the first place. The Acolyte seems like a huge step in the right direction, hopefully, it stays in that direction.
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