The Star Wars live-action TV series has been delayed for a while now due to “budgetary costs” and though Lucas recently let us know that 50 hours of scripts exist for the project, it’s not moving forward yet.
In an interview with producer Rick McCallum for Czech Position (a country where the series is supposed to be shot) he gives an update on the status of the show.
The TV series is on hold, but that has nothing to do with the Czech Republic; it has to do with [the episodes being] so ambitious… We have 50 hours of third-draft scripts, but the problem we have is there is a lot of digital animation; we don’t have the technology yet to be able to do them at a price that is safe for television. Since we would be financing them, it would be suicide for us to do this [now]. So we are going to wait three or four years.
Network television and cable television as we know it are completely imploding, so we’re not really sure that in five years’ time we can release a dramatic one-hour episode because it is all reality TV now.
It’s an curious point he makes about TV, and I think he’s wrong as I wouldn’t say it’s “imploding.” Yes, there is still a ton of reality shit on the air, but now we have less “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire” and more “Mad Men,” Breaking Bad,” “Dexter, “Game of Thrones” etc. Yes, the model is shifting to different means of distribution be it on demand or Hulu streaming and what have you, but to say hour long dramas will cease to exist altogether in five years? There’s no way.
As for the plot of the series, McCallum gives a hint.
Basically, it is like ‘The Godfather’; it’s the Empire slowly building up its power base around the galaxy, what happens in Coruscant, which is the major capital, and it’s [about] a group of underground bosses who live there and control drugs, prostitution.
Step one to making an affordable Star Wars live-action TV show: Don’t set it in a place that requires 100% of the environment to be CGI like Coruscant. The synposis itself sounds like its trying to be Star Wars: The Wire, but to think George Lucas could ever write a script that reaches that show’s level of brilliance is laughable.
I think that on first impression, the idea of a live-action Star Wars show sounds awesome. But so did a new trilogy of movies, and I don’t trust George Lucas with his own property any more. This permanent fascination with the events of the prequels and the time before that I will never understand, and the series has to move forward at some point in the future, perhaps only after Lucas exists as a smiling ghost by a campfire.