Why Andor's Original Five-Season Plan Was Canceled

Across 24 episodes of the Disney+ "Star Wars" series "Andor," audiences got to experience thrilling escapes, political intrigue, and explosive battles. But as hard as it might be to imagine, the original vision for the show was even more ambitious because creator Tony Gilroy had originally planned to have not just two seasons of the show, but five.

The first season of "Andor" takes place five years before we meet Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in "Rogue One," and the original plan was for each season of the show to cover the remaining four years until we arrived at the events of "Rogue One."

This incredibly ambitious plan sounded great on paper, but they quickly realized their biggest hurdle wasn't the story but their own mortality. Gilroy recounted to SFX Magazine that they were "halfway through shooting Season 1, coming through COVID" when "the monumental size of the show, the effort, and everything else was just dawning on us."

Producing something so grand is no easy feat, and that's when Gilroy realized their original five-season plan was physically impossible. "We realized that I didn't have enough calories to do it, and Diego's face couldn't take the timing because it just takes too long to make it."

By the time they were filming Season 1 of "Andor," Luna was already 6 years older than he was in "Rogue One," and so even if Gilroy and the LucasFilm team had the stamina to bring such a monumental series to life, Luna would have ended it over a decade older than in his spry take on Cassian in the original film. For a series that gets so much dramatic power out of its connection to that film, this meant Gilroy had no choice but to radically reshape his vision for the show.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and Tony Gilroy's solution to their mortality problem was "born out of desperation" to give the series the conclusion it deserved. Due to restrictions on production during the COVID pandemic, Season 1 of "Andor" tasked each director with producing three episodes of the show together. These blocks each formed a kind of miniature movie, and as Gilroy and his writing team got to work trying to figure out how to bring their story to an end in just one season, they realized they already had the answer to their problem.

With 12 episodes in each season, they could truncate their remaining four seasons of story into four three-episode arcs. "It's a fascinating experiment," Gilroy admits, "And I don't know if anyone's ever done it before. We're going to jump a year between each block, and we're going to use that negative space in a really interesting way, coming back for three days at a time."

This experiment paid off. The "Andor" series finale topped the Nielsen streaming charts (and managed to give "Rogue One" a big bump as well), and writer Dan Gilroy won the Emmy for outstanding writing in a drama in a surprising upset.

So even if we only got a fraction of the "Andor" Tony Gilroy had originally planned to serve us, it's clear that he and the rest of the creative team left nothing behind.