5 years ago, The Mandalorian made Star Wars fun again

It is a reality of Hollywood filmmaking that the longer a franchise goes on, the more baggage it accrues — both culturally and canonically. Hollywood’s studios have done their best to ignore this in recent years, but one need look no further than Star Wars for proof. What was once the crown jewel of the franchise world has become a troubled property plagued by creative issues, toxic fans, and recycled ideas. As the franchise’s novelty has faded, viewers’ hunger for truly new stories set in the Star Wars universe has grown.

Lucasfilm, unfortunately, has struggled to meet that demand. This week marks the five-year anniversary of the last time the studio did, though viewers didn’t exactly know beforehand that The Mandalorian was exactly what they’d been looking for when it premiered on Disney+ on November 12, 2019. It didn’t take long to realize, however, that the Jon Favreau-created series was new, fresh, and — above all else — a lot of fun. It consequently brought new life back to its fictional universe just before Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker almost sucked all of it out of the franchise in December of that same year.

Unfortunately, sometime in the five years since it premiered, The Mandalorian lost the very thing that initially made it such a welcome answer to Star Wars’ problems.

Low-stakes Star Wars fun

Lucasfilm

Nobody really knew what to expect from The Mandalorian. There had never before been a live-action Star Wars TV series — let alone one on what was at the time a relatively new streaming service. What they ultimately got was a fairly straightforward, procedural bounty hunter show set in the Star Wars universe. Its premiere follows the show’s Man With No Name-coded hero, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), as he works a few jobs, collects a body, and then finds himself staring face-to-face with his latest quarry, a green-skinned child of unknown origin that fans quickly took to calling “Baby Yoda.”

It’s hard to understate just how immediately refreshing The Mandalorian felt when it premiered. The series’ first episode isn’t like anything else that the Star Wars franchise had previously produced. It is low stakes, shaggy, and cool-headed. It marches to its own, distinctly television-y beat, and it has more in common with an episode of Bonanza than it does A New Hope or The Phantom Menace. In its premiere, The Mandalorian is exactly what it promised viewers it would be: a Star Wars show about a bounty hunter. For much of its first season, in fact, The Mandalorian has no interest in being anything more than that, and that is partly what made watching it such a rejuvenating experience in late 2019.

A new hope for an old franchise

Lucasfilm

When it premiered, The Mandalorian was the first piece of visual Star Wars media set between the franchise’s Original and Sequel Trilogies — meaning it had almost complete creative freedom right off the bat to go wherever it wanted and do whatever it pleased. That freedom was especially palpable coming off several Lucasfilm releases — The Force Awakens, Rogue One, Solo — that felt suffocatingly constrained by the events and stories of previous Star Wars titles. By introducing a Yoda-esque creature at the end of its first episode, The Mandalorian also proved that it had the courage to do things no other Star Wars project had done before.

It all felt new. That, perhaps more than anything else, made The Mandalorian a project that Star Wars felt compelled to embrace and celebrate. At the time, the franchise had already begun to feel sluggish and stale. It was so weighed down by its previous installments that it seemed to be in danger of entering a state of complete entropy. That reality was only made clearer by the release of the frustratingly stuck-in-place Rise of Skywalker. In comparison to that film, The Mandalorian seemed even more like a freewheeling breath of fresh air.

That’s because it was… for a time, anyway.

A disastrous mistake

Lucasfilm

For reasons that remain mysterious and baffling, The Mandalorian chose to take on more cargo. It weighed itself down in its second and third seasons by introducing numerous storylines from Dave Filoni’s animated Clone Wars and Rebels TV shows. In the process, it transformed itself from a low-key, standalone TV series into the foundation of a post-Original Trilogy Star Wars universe, and it lost a lot of the effortless charm that made it seem at first like a tonic in a dry Tatooine desert. Pascal’s Din was even sidelined in The Mandalorian‘s third season in favor of giving Katee Sackhoff’s Bo-Katan a more pronounced role in a story that felt too big for the show and too disconnected from its humble roots.

To watch The Mandalorian‘s second and third seasons is to watch a show born that was initially free of the many canonical obligations that were already drowning its franchise’s other installments now willingly take more on than it could ever carry. Jon Favreau, a filmmaker well-versed in the samurai and Western films that originally inspired George Lucas nearly 50 years ago, gradually ceded control of his show to Filoni, Star Wars’ most devout devotee. Now, the series’ future is tied to the success of the forthcoming spinoff film, The Mandalorian & Grogu, which will itself likely tie into an in-development, Filoni-directed crossover film that will reportedly bring the New Republic story started by The Mandalorian to a close.

Lucasfilm

In its current state, The Mandalorian only loosely resembles the show it once was. It has been consumed by the very same franchise practices that have dragged down countless other properties in recent years. That is a disappointing reality to wrestle with on The Mandalorian‘s fifth anniversary, especially as we look back and remember what a shot-in-the-arm it originally felt like.

The series could still one day find its initial, light-on-its-feet rhythms again. But even if it never does, the lessons of The Mandalorian shouldn’t be forgotten or overlooked. As important as canonical consistency and familiarity may be in Hollywood’s modern franchise era, what most viewers really want at the end of the day from their blockbuster TV shows and movies are fresh stories that are fun and easy to get lost in, and which don’t require additional homework to be enjoyed. It may not have done so for very long, but The Mandalorian gave Star Wars fans exactly that in 2019.

The Mandalorian seasons 1-3 are streaming now on Disney+.