Butler's Cinema Scene

“ANDOR” (Disney +)

For three decades the “Star Wars” franchise has been getting progressively dumber, bottoming out with the so-bad-I-couldn’t watch them “The Book of Boba Fett” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Which makes the stunning adultness of “Andor” all the more miraculous.

We were introduced to Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He was one of the commandoes  who die transmitting the schematics of the first Death Star to their rebel brethren. “Rogue One” had a few narrative blips but it at least stood on its own in the “Star Wars” universe as a dead serious, camp-free espionage thriller.

Disney’s “Andor” is a prequel depicting Cassian Andor’s early years, and it pushes the solemnity and darkness of “Rogue One” to the very edge. Showrunner and frequent screenwriter Tony Gilroy makes few concessions for the family audience. This series takes as its models police procedurals, film noir, prison pictures and political dramas, and the results are gritty, grim and glorious.

The show covers much territory, opening on a dank corporate-run planet where Cassian kills a couple of thuggish security officers and taking side trips to the Empire’s capital city of Coruscant, a watery prison planet  and, in flashbacks, the primitive tribal world where our hero was born.

This early episodes depict Andor’s life as a criminal fugitive and his run-ins with the Empire…presumably this self-serving mercenary will be thoroughly radicalized in the second season.

The series resurrects from the original “Star Wars” film the character of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), a member of the Imperial Senate working secretly for the rerbellion, and delivers a whole slew of new faces, among them Stellan Skarsgard as a Machiavellian rebel spymaster and Denise Gough as a dangerously effective Imperial security specialist.

What’s remarkable here is that none of these are throwaway roles.  The villains, usually only paper thin in the “Star Wars” universe, are here given substance and backgrounds. 

The dialogue is smart and the production values off the charts. Every episode, it seems, has at least one tour de force action sequence.

And so far there’s not a Jedi in sight.

“REBOOT”  (Hulu)

It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud at my TV set…but “Reboot” had me howling.

This wickedly clever comedy from Steven Levitan (“The Larry Sanders Show,” “Modern Family”) is an orgy of inside-show-biz rim shots.  The premise finds the cast of a cheesy ‘90s TV family sitcom being reunited 20 years later for an updated version (yeah, just like “Roseanne” and “The Connors”).

The years have not been good to the actors, who are thrilled to be back in the spotlight…and immediately pick up the bad habits they indulged in back in the day.

Keegan-Michael Key is an insecure leading man who overthinks everything; Judy Greer is perfect as his on-screen wife and off-screen ex-squeeze.  Johnny Knoxville  of “Jackass” fame is jaw-droppingly  good as the substance-abusing co-star trying to stay straight, while Paul Reiser and Rachel Bloom (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) are sublime as the father-and-daughter producing team working out the kinks in their troubled relationship.

Along the way “Reboot” is practically a comic tutorial in how TV gets made.  The scenes in the writers’ room are among the funniest TV I’ve seen in years…think “The Dick Van Dyke” show with an unstoppable potty mouth.

“THE ENGLISH” (Amazon Prime)

This six-part Western from writer/director Hugo Blick often bites off more than it can swallow, and its narrative frequently becomes stranded in dead-end alleys.

Yet there’s something about it that kept me coming back for more.

For starters, the ever-watchable Emily Blunt. Here she plays Lady Cornelia Locke, a Brit aristocrat who comes to the 1890s Wild West on a mission of vengeance.  She’s looking to kill the man she blames for the death of her son.  The details of the boy’s demise are not revealed until late in the series, and when they finally hit  home “The English” comes on with the power of an Ibsen tragedy.

Cornelia shares her gruesome and dangerous quest with  Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Cherokee scout who has only recently resigned after years with the U.S. Army. That government gig that has left Eli seriously conflicted, given that his job was tracking down and killing other Native Americans.  Now he must come to terms with his new life as a second-class citizen and his forbidden (for more than one reason) intimacy with Cornelia.

Their journey plays out against an exquisitely photographed landscape (d.p. Arnau Valius Colonel takes full advance of the series’ Spanish locations) populated by characters who at best are wildly eccentric and at worst sadistically venal. 

But all of them speak in a florid style that reminds of “Deadwood’s” Al Swearengen. Black is a first-class wordsmith who can pack tons of meaning in brief exchanges; the dialogue is so spectacular that it helps gloss over the show’s meandering narrative.

| Robert W. Butler