The Rings of Power and 4 more disappointing genre shows from 2022
By Dan Selcke
Star Wars and Marvel TV shows that aren’t Andor
Disney released a lot of live-action shows on Disney+ in 2022, many from big franchises like Marvel and Star Wars: they included Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Andor. One of these shows, Andor, was excellent. Like, I had no idea Disney was capable of making a show like this. A taut political thriller that credibly turned the Empire from Star Wars into an intimidating threat, resisted fan service, built up compelling characters and lucidly critiqued the bureaucracy of power and the prison-industrial complex? Who knew Disney had that in them?
Andor also threw into relief how much the rest of Disney’s lineup in 2022 was just sort of…fine. Again, not bad; all of the shows I listed above have their virtues — Ms. Marvel was sweet, Moon Knight had some cool moments, it was fun seeing Ewan McGregor back as Obi-Wan, etc — but most of them gave off whiffs of, “This could be half as long and lose nothing.” Some had me questioning whether they needed to be made at all.
Yes, seeing Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen fighting a Star War again is neat, but “neat” is not reason enough by itself to mount a huge production like this, and Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t really have much else to offer. I laughed at a couple of the jokes in She-Hulk, but most I didn’t, and the show spent so much energy spotlighting cameos from other Marvel characters it felt like a commercial for the franchise as a whole, not a show that could stand on its own. The best episodes of The Book of Boba Fett had nothing to do with the title character and everything to do with the Mandalorian, a character from an entirely different show; why were these episodes of Boba Fett at all, and not of The Mandalorian?
When it came to Disney in 2022, there were a mounting sense that it was diluting a lot of its biggest franchises. Some of these shows were good, but they were rarely good enough, not with the money and name recognition being thrown around. Going forward, unless someone at Disney has an idea for a new show that’s just too good to be ignored, and an invested team willing to execute, I hope that, before they pull the trigger, they ask themselves, “Do we really need to make this?” Too many of these shows felt like they were being made to meet a quota, or out of habit. I want them to feel special again.