Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry: Abbott Elementary Has Nailed the Evolution of Gregory Eddie.
This week, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew — a title that will henceforth be shortened to Skeleton Crew — debuted on Disney+ with a two-part premiere. The show is billed as an Amblin-esque look at the Star Wars universe (because acknowledging that they wanted to make their own Stranger Things money would be telling on themselves), but finds itself devoid of personality early on. The first episode is essentially four kids, of which only one is remotely charming, bumbling around the space suburbs while worrying about a kidsbop version of the Accuplacer test. There’s a greater problem at play though. Dull characters can be fleshed out with time, and rapport can be built as young actors have more scenes together (or, more succinctly, the writers figure out how to write for them), but you cannot solve for an utter lack of pilot episode or, more succinctly, a successful series premiere.
A pilot episode’s textbook purpose is to sell a series to a network. This practice isn’t as common in the streaming age, with the birth of my very least favorite contemporary idea: that television series are just meant to be very long movies hacked up with a machete and vomited on a streaming platform. However, the reason pilot episodes are so important is because it is their job to both introduce key characters and set the stakes of the show from the jump. That’s why pilots are so frequently (but not always) used as the first episode of a series, and why creators either losing the art or no longer being allowed to make a pilot is devastating to television as an art form.
I’ve harped endlessly on the lack of pilots in streaming and my utter disdain for the idea of television series needing to be x-hour movies, but I struggle to think of a show more desperate for a meaningful premiere than Skeleton Crew. The first episode’s 47 minutes barely see a moment of intrigue, and the second episode is only slightly better off with the introduction of Jude Law’s definitely-not-the-faceless-captain-we-see-mutinied-against in the first moments of Episode 1. That is nearly a feature-length film’s worth of time where all we learned was that one kid wants to be a Jedi and daddy doesn’t love him, one girl’s very tough, one kid’s very smart, and the last one’s very scared (and, yes, quite cute). Also there are pirates and no one in the known galaxy knows what the heck At Attin is. But what we’re not given is a single reason to care whether or not those kids make it home to Space Pleasantville, or what their next move will be if they don’t.
If I had one hope for Skeleton Crew, it would be that it would be a new entry point for young viewers into the Star Wars universe. Star Wars should have stories for kids! (Star Wars, as a whole, is for kids.) But their grand plan to get kids engaged in Star Wars was, sorry let me check my notes here… space suburbs. Is the promise of pirates going to be enough to get kids hopeful that this could be Goonies in space? It really doesn’t feel like it. The “idyllic” At Attin is a place where all of the children exclusively study and all of the parents exclusively work. Emotionless droids nudge each demographic along, insisting they follow the creepy rules of their creepy planet. There’s potential for poignance there later on, but how much does that matter when the introduction is so alarmingly dull?
Skeleton Crew has the opportunity to shift away from the traditional Star Wars pitfalls, even with the Jedi worship! The issue is, the first episode does absolutely nothing to engage me with that possibility. I’ll keep watching because I gotta, but are kids going to? The Rotten Tomatoes score indicates a lot of love for the series, so maybe the desire for a new Star Wars film is so strong that people will put up with the whole eight-hour movie thing when it comes to the series. But damn, I miss TV.
