I didn't watch it when it came out because I was already souring on Star Wars and I pretty much forgot about it, but I've been playing a Star Wars EU based custom DND style tabletop with some buddies for a few weeks and one of them gave me a thumb drive with Andor on it.
It was pretty fucking good. And that's what leads me to being disappointed. It's like having a glimpse of what could have been but wasn't. Even at its "height" of Mandalorian Season 1, Disney Star Wars tv shows were nothing more than normieslop, and got progressively worse from there. I stopped watching after season 2 and only dipped back in to watch Ahsoka because I liked Rebels, and it was the worst thing I've ever seen. All of this was on the high seas of course.
But the here's this relatively obscure show that most people didn't even watch ending up having the best writing out of anything Disney Star Wars produced. And of course it's ignored in favor of more DEI slop like Acolyte. Andor will probably never get a season 2, if it does they'll almost certainly fuck it up, and the entire Star Wars tv show experiment will be remembered like a wet fart during a job interview. All the while, Andor shows that there was at least at one point, a chance for it to have been more, but was deliberately steered away from that by malicious actors at the top.
Was it really that good or did you lower your standards to such a degree that you've started to look away from all the DEI crap?
It was actually that good. Easy 8/10 even without DEI goggles.
To be clear, there are too many powerful women. Imp would hate it for that alone, and I can't fault him for that. The writer could have easily cut out 2 or 3 of them without losing much. Mon Mothma gets a pass because she's an OT character who's shown to already be the leader of the rebellion, so it makes sense that she did some shit to get there. A few others have believable roles, and none of them are too grating and all are acted well enough with a good enough script that it's palatable. But it's overshadowed by the main male characters. Andor himself is legitimately the star of his own show, which is shocking given it's Disney, and he is given the star treatment. He's shown to be intelligent, ruthless, cunning, dedicated, and is given a full arc explaining why he becomes the guy we see in Rogue One. The other main one, Stellan Skarsgård, dominates every scene he's in, and is easily shown to be head and shoulders above any of the female cast members. And I can't think of any male characters who are written to be idiots, bumbling fools, comically sexist feminist caricatures, or written poorly to make female characters seem better in contrast. Even the male head of the Imperial Security Bureau is shown to be a good leader and that he has the job for a reason.
Hyper security prison meets leaky water pipe.
Andor actually feels like 4/5/6 Star Wars in long form. It's got some slow stretches, but most of why they are boring is because you're just waiting for another scene with Stellan Skarsgard.
Skarsgard has got a great character and interesting dialog, but he's also a really good actor. I remember first seeing him in Aberdeen, where he played a convincing drunk; he didn't look like an actor acting drunk he looked like he was actually a chronic alcoholic. There's usually some little movements or stance that belie the act.