There was a lot of big news that came out of this year's Star Wars Celebration, though Andor being super-sized was among the biggest (literally). The Disney+ series will consist of two 12-episode seasons, making it the longest, and perhaps most ambitious, Star Wars TV show to date.
At the event, we learned that the first season will focus on a single year in Cassian Andor's life, with the next batch of episodes spanning the following four years and taking us right into the events of 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Many fans have wondered how that will work (it's an odd structure on the surface), but showrunner Tony Gilroy has explained all to Empire.
"The scale of the show is so huge," he begins. "Directors work in blocks of three episodes, so we did four blocks [in Season 1] of three episodes each."
"We looked and said, ‘Wow, it’d be really interesting if we come back, and we use each block to represent a year. We’ll move a year closer with each block,'" Gilroy confirms. "From a narrative point of view, it’s really exciting to be able to work on something where you do a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then jump a year."
So, in other words, three episodes in season 2 will represent a year of Cassian's life, meaning his story won't be too rushed as we head into that second batch of episodes. There had been chatter online about a third season, leaving many fans to assume that Lucasfilm had perhaps changed course and decided to cram four years into one season rather than one year per season.
Instead, it sounds like this might have been the plan all along, though we are intrigued about what's so important about that first year that it warrants an entire season of storytelling.
Buckle up for an in-depth origin story when Andor hits Disney+ on August 31, anyway!