December 1988. A terraced house in a village in North Yorkshire. The television, a faux-wood box on legs with a convex screen, is the centre of attention. My brother and I sit on the tufted carpet and gaze at the box adoringly, opening our little hearts and minds and guts to the incoming emotional rollercoaster.
People talk about appointment television. At an age (seven) when I literally had no other appointments, the BBC’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was an unmissable event. The days between weekly episodes in the run-up to Christmas passed in a haze of anticipation and frequent spot checks with my parents: “Is it today? Tomorrow?” Fast forward to 2022. Everyone binge-watches, nobody waits. So it was with some surprise that I found myself last month absently wondering, is it today? Tomorrow?
The show this time was Andor, a 12-part series from Disney Plus that landed in weekly instalments from September. Like the Narnia adaptation of my childhood, it’s a tale of good and evil, power and rebellion, cruelty and sacrifice. It really gains altitude in episode three, but even from the first noirish episode, through which our hero (a magnetic Diego Luna) hurries and hides and occasionally runs, hooded and afraid, through sheets of rain, I was hooked. Andor is named after its protagonist, but it’s really about fascism: the way some people crave its clear lines and hierarchies and all-consuming order, and others rebel against it with every sinew, and still others carve out a place in the middle, collaborators or double agents or citizens keeping their head down and hoping to survive.
Andor is my favourite show of the year, but when I mention it to people, the usual reaction is a blank look and then, “And/Or? Is that the name?” It’s SO GOOD, I say, you have to watch it, but then someone mentions The White Lotus season 2 theme song or a meme from I’m a Celebrity and everyone moves on. What makes a series cut through the 100,000-plus hours of content now available on streaming platforms? More importantly, what makes one worth waiting for?
I should probably tell you that Andor is a Star Wars show, one of those increasingly ubiquitous spin-offs that litter our cultural landscape. I delayed mentioning it because unless you’re a fan of the franchise, it might put you off, and that would be a shame. You don’t need to have seen any of the approximately three million Star Wars-related films, shows or animated series to enjoy it. There’s no Darth Vader, no lightsaber battles. It is grounded and corporeal and builds tension with a mastery that is entirely typical of showrunner Tony Gilroy, who wrote the Bourne trilogy and Michael Clayton.
In the second episode, a man stands in a bell tower, lifts two hammers from a wall and raises one above his head. He grunts. He swings. Clang. As one arm rises, the other falls. Clang. Is it a call to prayer? A warning? The music the hammers make, and the scene as a whole, is both jarring and thrilling. The precise sound was the result of hours of experimentation by Nicholas Britell, Andor’s composer (who scored Succession, Moonlight and The Big Short) and Gilroy, using warped pipes and other objects in the latter’s basement. The bell-ringer, whose name we never learn but whose title in the credits is “the Time-Grappler”, sounds the anvil to mark the start and end of the working day.
He’s one example of a world so richly imagined that you sense it continuing when you turn off the TV. The Time-Grappler’s home, Ferrix, is part of a free-trade sector in an increasingly authoritarian empire, and its rhythms are not spiritual but capitalist. Everyone works, everyone is tired. Objects and robots are smeared with soot or tarnished with rust, half broken or many times mended.
This is a kind of kitchen-sink sci-fi, or, as the critic Patrick Freyne wrote in the Irish Times, “Mike Leigh’s Star Wars”. The bureaucrats running the empire are devastatingly human and familiar, avatars of the modern workplace, embodying Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and totally relatable in their petty rivalries, snafus and jockeying for favour.
Two of the most successful streaming properties this year, according to Nielsen, have been Netflix’s Dahmer, a controversial true crime drama about the serial killer, and The Crown. Both plunge viewers into detailed recreations of recent history, and honestly, I have no interest in watching either. Science fiction transports us out of the world we know so well, but the best of the genre turns alternate realities into mirrors in which we briefly catch our own reflection. In 1973, the American novelist Ursula K Le Guin defined the essential function of science fiction as “distancing, the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better”.
The real reason Andor is exceptional, though, is not in the world-building, the plotting or the contemporary resonance. You can find these in many TV shows these days. It’s in something rarer: characters you care about, whose lives feel real, whose fates weigh on your mind. Just as my seven-year-old self felt bound to Lucy Pevensie and the White Witch, so Luna’s Cassian Andor, Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen and Denise Gough’s rigid, sadistic Dedra have stalked my consciousness this month. At one point in the final episode, which is so tightly scripted and scored that you can barely take a breath, a character gives Cassian a message from his mother and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. That’s a TV show worth waiting for.
Esther Bintliff is deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine
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