Disney+ Cancels First Star Wars Show Made by a Lesbian — Here’s Why That SUCKS

It feels like we’ve been here before… The latest Star Wars drops. It’s new, maybe a tad more challenging than your standard adventure in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, and happens to center women and POC characters. A population of online nerds lose their collective shit as a result of that last bit. Sure, they may claim that they have legitimate criticisms, but the hate seems pretty damn loud to just be the usual frustration with a flawed franchise entry. Anyways, Lucasfilm (and their Sith Masters, the Walt Disney Corporation) panic and course correct, pivoting to a safe and familiar follow up, which ends up sucking major Bantha Poodoo.

Anyways, word on the street this week is that Lucasfilm has pulled the plug on The Acolyte, just a little over a month after its first (and now only) season concluded. It’s a beyond disappointing decision not only for fans of the series and its characters, but also for how it speaks to the way major corporations like Disney decide what sort of stories they want to tell. Regardless of how you shake it, the Star Wars show that was produced by a lesbian, had a nonbinary lead and a cast of queer and POC performers, and a narrative that didn’t rely solely on nostalgia and brand recognition was given the axe. And that just sucks.

While director Leslye Headland purposefully wrote The Acolyte to comfortably sit as a single season narrative if it had to, the finale hinted at all manner of interesting ideas down the road and was decidedly open-ended in how it concluded most of its major character arcs. Amandla Stenberg’s Osha, former Jedi and one of our two twin leads, discovered the truth about the Jedi’s involvement in her family’s death and turned against her master, choking him to death and joining forces with the unnamed hunky Sith Lord played by Manny Jacinto. Meanwhile, Osha’s formerly villainous twin Mae (also Stenberg) had her memories erased but still found herself recruited by a rogue Jedi to hunt her sister and her new master down. Oh, and a certain super-secret legendary Sith may be keeping an eye on things. The potential for fun and thought-provoking stories is there, and if the first season of The Acolyte succeeded at anything (besides utterly badass lightsaber duels) it was in getting its audience to challenge and reconsider their preconceived notions of a series nearing 50 years old. But, I guess we’re not getting that now.

It’s almost impossible not to read this decision as a response to the overblown and bigoted reaction this series received from the worst corners of the internet. Review bombed to hell and back from the moment its first trailer dropped, the prejudice directed at The Acolyte never appeared remotely rational or proportional to the supposed sins the series had committed. Some of the infamous (and unbelievably mind numbing) complaints hurled at the series concerned a fire on a spaceship and the birthday for that one Jedi whose head kinda looks like a dick. This isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate criticisms to make about The Acolyte as a series, particularly in regard to its overall narrative pacing and occasionally clunky direction, but I could make the same observation about pretty much every single one of Disney+’s shows, Star Wars or not. The Acolyte was a good, sometimes great, show that was just starting to find its footing by the time its eight-episode season reached its end. It was by no means the sort of catastrophe that the 18% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes would lead you to believe.

The far right trolls of the Internet are already celebrating this decision. Elon Musk even responded to a post covering the cancellation with “Go ____, Go ____” (or “Go Woke, Go Broke” if you aren’t familiar with the kind of lingo that fascist billionaires are using nowadays). Similarly, Amandla Stenberg’s socials have been flooded with comments smugly deriding them for The Acolyte’s cancellation. Regardless of whether the far right backlash to the series played a role in Disney/Lucasfilm’s decision, the message has been received loud and clear by the worst sectors of the fandom. The bigoted assholes think they’ve won, and it sets a scary precedent for what’s to follow.

The only real behind-the-scenes factor I could see playing a role in The Acolyte’s cancellation is its absolutely absurd $22 million per episode budget. The Acolyte is a good-looking show. I love its practical sets, creature effects, and cinematic action sequences, but I for the life of me cannot figure out where that kind of money could be going. It’s not like each installment featured massive effects-heavy set pieces. House of the Dragon has CGI giant fire-breathing reptiles as regular cast members and somehow manages to cost less. Maybe some behind-the-scenes logistics called for that kind of money, but the reasoning escapes me.

Even still, there’s nothing to say that The Acolyte couldn’t have continued with a reduced budget for its second season. I, and many other fans for that matter, would have loved to see a smaller scale continuation that focused on our returning cast of characters and their personal drama over more intergalactic stakes. Sure, if we could get more stellar lightsaber duels like the ones in the series’ standout fifth episode and its finale, that would be wonderful, but I can’t imagine that good fight choreography is racking up multimillion dollar bills.

The Acolyte’s cancellation also can’t help but feel like the continuation of a bad streaming habit of giving shows the axe after a single season. Netflix has become infamous for canceling new series within a few weeks after the debut of their first season. While these are often expensive productions and it’s understandable that a company may want to hedge its bets, the skittishness about giving a show any kind of long-term lifespan feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. How often do you find yourself recommending shows under the caveat that the first season is a little bumpy? It sometimes takes a year or two for a creative team to gain their footing and signs of promise or potential deserve a chance to blossom into full on success. Two of the most beloved additions to the Star Wars canon — the animated shows The Clone Wars and Rebels — both debuted to relatively bumpy and divisive first seasons but went on to become hits that (for better and for worse) are defining parts of the franchise’s long-term narrative. New ideas take time to settle, and if the gradual decline in viewership for Disney+’s Star Wars shows is any indication, a little bit of fresh air is desperately needed.

Let me go on a bit of a tangent. As you’ve no likely guessed by now, I’m kind of a Star Wars nerd. I also happen to teach undergraduate students. Naturally, my love for lightsabers and X-Wings tends to come up in classroom conversation. One trend that’s taken me off guard is that my student’s favorite Star Wars film has far and away been the 2005 prequel trilogy installment, Revenge of the Sith. This always struck me as odd considering that most of my students were in diapers at the time of the movie’s release. I saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters as a 12 year old, presumably the prime age for nostalgia, and I’ve always considered it to be more or less okay, which is a sentiment echoed by most others my age. So why is it that Gen Z really seems to love this movie in particular (especially when there are like at least four better Star Wars movies out there)? Well, it’s because of The Clone Wars, the animated spinoff show that ran from 2008-2014 and covered the span of time between the second and third installments of the prequel trilogy. While these fans were too young to catch George Lucas’s big operatic space tragedy in theaters, they were exactly the right age to get caught up in the animated adventures of Anakin Skywalker and his plucky padawan, Ahsoka Tano, on Cartoon Network. And Revenge of the Sith just so happens to be the Star Wars movie that most resembles The Clone Wars in both visuals and story. A new generation of fans was brought into this universe by watching a very weird and at times controversial show that was pretty much only able to survive its regular cycles of backlash because it was practically financed in its entirety by George Lucas’s bottomless money pit.

I don’t see how Star Wars or really any of these giant pop culture mega-franchises will allow itself to develop that kind of audience again if they continue to direct their attention so insularly and skittishly. Sure, The Mandalorian may have been a pop culture juggernaut, but the series quickly devolved into a parade of expanded universe cameos and seems more than comfortable to let its previously endearing main characters transform into empty brand names that exist to perpetuate a recognizable status quo. It’s headache-inducing that Ahsoka, a tepidly received show that serves as a direct spin-off to three separate series (two of which are animated), was renewed for a second season while a show that requires little to no barrier to entry like The Acolyte is given the axe. I have no idea how that’s sustainable. I have no idea who wants that. I’m the sort of girl who has watched every one of these damn things and I can barely get myself to care about The Mandalorian movie or what other self-cannibalizing show that Disney+ is about to spew out at me in six months’ time.

Lucasfilm has once again told us that when faced with a tough decision, it will bow to the angry voices of racists, misogynists, and homophobes, even if that means abandoning exciting new stories. Their choice is depressing, cynical, and predictable, like so much of the content that they insist on creating. At least, for one summer, we had a Star Wars show made by a lesbian, and it was pretty dang good.