Gaming🎮 The Acolyte shows the limits of TV in the streaming era

[Royal_Lizard]

Once upon a time, there was this little thing called cable. It let you watch many different shows, most of them kind of awful, for an amount of money that didn't really seem all that fair, but hey, what else are you gonna do, read a book? A lot of TV channels' output was mostly just something to have on in the background while you have a cuppa with your nan, but at the very least you had a lot of choice, and a lot to watch too. Seasons would last up to 24 episodes sometimes, and even if a show wasn't perfect, it at least had time to grow, particularly from season to season. Then Netflix happened.

I'm sure you generally know the rest: it was a cheaper alternative to cable that had all your favourite shows, eventually introducing original content you could only get there. One of the issues, however, was that there just wasn't as much of it. Seasons gradually got shorter and shorter, to the point that most of the subscription selling hits run from around 8-10 hour long episodes a pop. And it has hurt television quite broadly, with the most recent victim being the latest addition to the Star Wars universe, The Acolyte (major spoilers ahead for the first five episodes).

Set around 100 years before the events of the original Star Wars films, The Acolyte is set during the High Republic era, a time of general peace, with something sinister going on behind the scenes. Some guy who certainly looks like a Sith (whose identity I won't spoil for you) has been manipulating a young, Force sensitive woman to go around killing Jedi. This is of course complicated by the fact that said young woman has a twin sister, who she was separated from, also Force sensitive and a former Jedi-in-training. There are also a couple of side characters, Yord, a slightly incompetent Jedi Knight, and Jecki, a smart and confident Padawan.

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