'Andor' Viewership In Toilet, Fails To Chart Despite Three-Episode Premiere And Attempted Rape Storyline
Lucasfilm’s latest live-action Star Wars series on Disney+, Andor Season 2, failed to chart on Luminate’s top streaming originals for television chart for the week of April 18th through the 24th.
Andor, which had a three episode premiere on April 22nd, with the episodes having runtimes of 54 minutes, 47 minutes, and 56 minutes respectively failed to best Bosch: Legacy, which attracted 278.9 million viewers on Prime Video for the week and was the 10th most streamed series on Luminate’s charts.
This appears to indicate a massive falloff from the show’s first season albeit Luminate’s week ends on Thursday so viewership from the show’s first weekend is not included.
Regardless, Nielsen reported back in 2022 that the show’s Season 1 finale, which included the release of just a single episode that week albeit it also included any binge watching from the previous episodes as well, achieved 674 million minutes watched.
These numbers are reflected in the total number of reviews for the various episodes of the show on IMDb as well. for example, the season finale of Season 1 had over 16,000 reviews while the first episode of Season 1 only achieved over 5,500 reviews, the second episode received 4,900, and the third received just over 5,300.
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Even more interesting, is that during the promotion of the show’s first season, showrunner Tony Gilroy admitted the show was chasing an audience. He told Variety, “I think I was surprised. I thought the show would go the other way, that we would have this gigantic, instantaneous audience that would just be everywhere, but that it would take forever for non-‘Star Wars’ people or critics or my cohort of friends to get involved in the show.”
“The opposite happened. We ended up with all this critical praise, all this deep appreciation and understanding from really surprising number of sources, and we’re chasing the audience,” he admitted.
It appears the show is still chasing the audience, but is in fact chasing it away. And it is doing so by including attempted rapes in the storyline and having the show’s creator attempt to market it by claiming, “We are all the product of rape.”
Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter, “I get one shot to tell everything I know — or can discover, or that I’ve learned — about revolution, about battles, with as many incidents and as many colors as I can get in there, without having [the story] tip over.”
“I mean, let’s be honest, man: The history of civilization, there’s a huge arterial component of it that’s rape. All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape,” he elaborated. “I mean armies and power throughout history [have committed rape]. So to not touch on it, in some way … It just was organic and it felt right, coming about as a power trip for this guy. I was really trying to make a path for Bix that would ultimately lead to clarity — but a difficult path to get back to clarity.”
When asked if he received any pushback from Lucasfilm or The Walt Disney Company about the inclusion of the scene, Gilroy shared, “No one ever ever said anything about it, ever.”
“But I mean, we have limits on what we can do. We are very aware of what we can do sexually and violence wise,” he said. “Those limits are made very clear.”
What do you make of the show’s premiere week viewership?
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“But I mean, we have limits on what we can do. We are very aware of what we can do sexually and violence wise. Those limits are made very clear.”
Translation: “We are shifting the Overton Window to the left. We are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not, and over time, we will shift public opinion.”
The Left has been playing the long game for decades. This is just another example.
If you look at the numbers, it's pretty obvious that it probably wasn't the story, so much as the fact that it was a Disney+ show. For a Disney+ show to chart, people would have to watch Disney+. There is only so much anyone who buys Disney+ for their kid to watch Bluey, and people on free trials are going to watch anything. No one is buying Disney+ for fake Star Wars, fake Marvel, or anything else. Once the free trial is over, it's Bluey and people who forget to cancel.