【18+ Archives】

Star Wars fans8+ Archivesbeen waiting for a live-action TV show for so long, they never would have guessed that the announcement of its development by Disney would go barely noticed.

But that's exactly what happened Thursday. Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed the company is working on a Star Wars TV drama to help launch its upcoming streaming service, just as CBS has used Star Trek Discoveryto sell CBS All Access subscriptions -- and the fact barely registered with Star Wars fandom. Why?

First of all the news -- revealed on a Disney investors call -- happened to drop at the same time as Lucasfilm's own huge reveal, and there's reason to believe that timing was deliberate.

Last Jedidirector Rian Johnson is producing a brand new Star Wars trilogy, a set of stories that will exist outside of the regular episode-based Skywalker saga. He'll also write and direct the first one, release date TBD.

Not only did that Lucasfilm announcement set off a firestorm of speculation about what area of Star Wars lore the new trilogy might cover -- the Old Republic? The tragedy of Darth Plagueis? Porgs? -- it also significantly raised the bar on expectations about Johnson's upcoming saga movie.

Johnson has never made a Star Wars movie before The Last Jedi, and he's just been given the keys to making a whole damn trilogy, likely costing no less than a billion dollars in total budget?

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Lucasfilm, and the corporate parent Disney (without which it wouldn't have made a call this big) must reallylike what Johnson did with The Last Jedi. It isn't just you; those beautifully-shot scenes in the trailers really do presage a phenomenal chunk of Star Wars that we're about to see.

Next to a trilogy, a TV show seems rather small potatoes, especially when there isn't even the slimmest iota of a detail to go on -- like the attachment of an exciting director. (Iger said Disney would have more to announce soon on its streaming plans, which also include show based on High School Musicaland Pixar's Monsters Inc., plus an unnamed project from Marvel.)

And besides, Star Wars fans have been before. For many years a Disney-Lucasfilm deal to produce an ABC TV show to be called "Star Wars Underworld" was in development; Lucasfilm still has 50 unproduced scripts for that show locked away in its vaults.

Rumors of the revival of Underworld -- a dark, gritty concept for a series which was set, not surprisingly, in the underworld of the Star Wars universe's city planet Coruscant -- have bedeviled the fandom for years. Iger may have thought it wise to avoid that kind of speculation as much as possible.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Disney and Lucasfilm rarely make public announcements that step on each others' toes like this, so one can presume the timing was at least somewhat deliberate. (We've reached out to Disney for comment, and will let you know in the unlikely event that they do.)

Iger was directing his comments to investors, after all. He may not want fans to pay too much attention to this particular statement about leveraging Disney properties for the streaming channel: "Our advantage as a company is to take advantages that exist out there for good television and take advantage of it."

That rather cold-sounding comment and Disney's truckloads of Star Wars profits aside, no one is actually being taken advantage of here. The market can take significantly more Star Wars stories.

It's a big galaxy, after all, and the seven Skywalker-based movies (plus Rogue One, the cartoonsClone Wars andRebels,and a couple of live-action Ewok TV movies) have barely scratched the surface of the kinds of storytelling possible in a space fantasy universe.

(Curiously enough, Clone Warsand Rebelsproducer Dave Filoni may have a hole in his schedule for a live action TV show now that Rebelsis in its final season.)

The Force is with any genuine attempt to meld Star Wars with the golden age of television. The old Underworld scripts are just one direction this could go. The galaxy far, far away isn't exactly infinite, but it might as well be.