How The Mandalorian is challenging our expectations of Peak TV
Light spoilers for The Mandalorian
When The Mandalorian was first announced viewers were amped to see just what Jon Favreau had in store for them. With its confident debut viewers were quickly enamoured with The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda, fast forward a year to “a record number” (according to Disney) watching the season two premiere on October 30th.
Is the show's success down to the charm of seeing Baby Yoda waddle through life eating whatever he pleases? Is it the swashbuckling adventures of Din Djarin, our mando in charge? Or is it just that the Star Wars brand is such a behemoth that either way this show would have been successful? I propose that the success of the show lies in its storytelling and its subversion of our expectations of Peak TV.
So what actually is Peak TV?
I’ll try to be concise. Peak TV is the umbrella term given to television series that have aired from the 2000s to this minute. This is also known as “The New Golden Age of TV”. Generally, a show classed as Peak TV will have a high budget, a well-known cast of actors, it will have a specific aesthetic and maybe even be made by a big-time movie director. Think The Sopranos, Mad Men or Breaking Bad. Most of these shows will be found on a cable network or streaming service. These shows have trained audiences to expect a serialised form of storytelling. These shows follow a few large storylines throughout the series and episodes are generally not self-contained.
On the other side of this coin, but still just as popular, are shows such as Law and Order SVU and The Flash, these are known as procedural shows. They will often follow a mystery of the week format and will be mostly self-contained. The majority of network tv is filled to the brim with procedural dramas that are successful because you can jump in and out of the show at any point.
To understand this week’s SVU episode you don’t have to have seen last weeks. Meanwhile, if you missed last week’s episode of The Third Day you would be completely lost this week.
How does The Mandalorian fit into this?
When The Mandalorian premiered, I like many others expected the show to be written like most Peak TV drama series. I expected a large, meaty storyline with some adventures sprinkled throughout, not a series of standalone stories that focused on the adventurous of the lone hero. The show blurs the lines between high budget prestige drama and procedural mystery of the week storytelling. In similar ways, The Witcher and Lovecraft Country do this. Less successfully mind you.
The show has the guise of the prestige tv shows but at its core is a show you can jump into at any point. And that’s why I think it’s great.
The decision to have two near-silent protagonists gives the show a chance to play with how it tells a story. In some episodes, we will go for minutes and minutes without a single line of dialogue. It’s unconventional for a mammoth Disney production to be stripped back and trust its viewers. Especially considering how they treated The Rise of Skywalker, the most recent Star Wars feature film released and probably the last for a while. A movie that excelled in bad exposition that the actors couldn't sell because it was so contrived.
The Mandalorian feels like a breath of fresh air because it is allowed to be frivolous. I can watch an episode of The Mandalorian and check out for forty to fifty minutes. When I watch an episode of the show I know I’m not going to watch a demanding HBO-style show. I think that is why the show has done so well. It is easy to connect with because it is so easy to watch.
Which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Most of my favourite shows this year have been extremely challenging pieces of media that push the boundaries of TV as a format. Shows like Devs and The Third Day are genre-bending series that take up so much of your headspace while you watch them that it can be impossible to escape them after watching them.
The show is made for both the casual viewers and the hardcore Star Wars fans. I may not have known who Cobb Vanth is and what the hell a Krayt Dragon is but I sure do now. I appreciate the light sprinkling of lore as opposed to lore heavy shows such as Game of Thrones. And I do worry that the show is just going to become an easter-egg factory, especially with the rumours of multiple pre-existing characters making appearances this season.
The Mandalorian is reminiscent of shows of our childhood, like Ben 10, X-Men and Teen Titans. This swashbuckling romp makes us feel like a child again. When we watch a show made in this era of Peak TV we expect to feel the exact opposite of that. We want and expect to be challenged as viewers but sometimes we just want to see what hijinks Mando and Baby Yoda get into, especially during these times…
The Mandalorian streams weekly, Fridays on Disney+
