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A Star Wars Netflix Show - 5 Potential Premises

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So, today marks the release of the second season of Daredevil - the third season of Marvel’s extremely successful Defenders Netflix shows. They’re almost unprecedented in their level of critical and audience acclaim as superhero programs - so, for a time, the question on everyone’s mind was “what about Star Wars?”

And, you know, it makes sense. Disney owns both Marvel and Star Wars, and having been able to not only replicate but exceed Marvel’s box office success with Star Wars, you’d expect Disney to at the very least look into doing the same on the small screen.

Here, then, are a couple of potential avenues that they might be able to explore…

An Animated Show, set between Episodes VI and VII

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Starting The Force Awakens as we did - a whole thirty years after Return of the Jedi - audiences were left with a lot of questions about what their favourite characters had been up to in the intervening years. For obvious reasons, you wouldn’t be able to have a live action series following Luke, Leia and Han after the battle of Endor… but why not an animated series?

Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels has proved that a successful animated series can exist; more recently, Rebels has brought back both Leia and Lando, showing that our heroes from the big screen can be resurrected in an animated form. This idea is one with a lot of potential, allowing us to explore one area of the galaxy that we’d all like to know a little bit more about.

An Obi-Wan Kenobi Mini-Series

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With the announcement of the anthology movies, one film fans have been clamoring for is an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie, set between Episodes III and IV. Ewan McGregor himself has said he’d love to do it – so why not? As one of the strongest actors in the prequel trilogy, McGregor certainly deserves another crack of the whip.

It’s easy to imagine a spaghetti western featuring the stoic Jedi; the harsh twin suns and the bleached desert providing a backdrop to a Seven Samurai style defense of a small village from a group of Tusken Raiders. With talented direction and a stellar script, this would be unforgettable.

A Space Noir detective show

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The seedy underbelly of Coruscant, as seen in Attack of the Clones, is a very evocative setting, and it opens up a whole world of possibilities. For the most part, we’ve operated in the comparatively nicer side of the galaxy, far far away – this premise would let us really dig deep into what it’s like beneath the surface.

A tense mystery featuring a cynical private eye, spanning from the underbelly of Coruscant to the heart of Jabba’s palace, perhaps with a cameo appearance from a rogue smuggler who recently starred in his own origin movie? Sign me up!

Tales from Maz Kanata’s Castle

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One of the more intriguing characters in The Force Awakens was Maz Kanata, played by Lupita Nyong’o. Maz ran an intergalactic “watering hole”, as Han Solo put it, a place of refuge which had stood for thousands of years. Across her long life, Maz had seen the battle between good and evil take many different forms, and been fought in many different ways.

Listening to the stories told by the patrons of Maz’s castle would be an excellent framing device for an anthology series, moving across all different types of stories, and really demonstrating just what, exactly, happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away…

An Office Style Imperial Mockumentary

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We’ve never really seen an out-and-out Star Wars comedy before (Jar-Jar Binks and Christmas specials notwithstanding) but SNL’s recent Kylo Ren undercover boss parody definitely proved that it could work. In fact, right now, both Marvel and DC are working on mockumentary sitcoms set in their respective universes - that’s Damage Control and Powerless respectively - so why not Star Wars?

While they might not necessarily want to go as far as guest appearances from Adam Driver as “Matt the radar technician”, or from James Earl Jones as the galaxy’s greatest father, I think there would be a lot of humour in allowing this show to play around in the margins of what has been established by the movies. (It’d be bleakly funny, I think, to set it on the first Death Star, with the final episode ending just before Luke blows it up.)

In any case, though, I think it’s fair to say that the Star Wars galaxy is a vast one, with a lot of storytelling potential - and I’d love to see it expanded with a Netflix show, no matter what form it may take.

Related:

Star Wars Retrospective

On the Identity of Kylo Ren

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