'Skeleton Crew' Is a Star Wars Show That Dares to Be 'Stranger Things'
'Skeleton Crew' does a good job of being a different kind of Star Wars, but maybe there should only be one kind of Star Wars?
Skeleton Crew is a show for dads to watch with their kids. It’s a Disney+ Star Wars1 show, a genre that started strong with The Mandalorian Season 1, but has fallen on hard times of late. Outside of the first two seasons of Mando, a few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, and all of the flukily excellent Andor, I have not watched the Disney+ Star Wars shows. I just haven’t been interested. After years of diminishing returns, Star Wars has entered the realm of stuff that I need to have a reason to watch. But a recommendation from someone whose taste I trust and an intriguing premise got me to watch Skeleton Crew. That premise is “Stranger Things but Star Wars.”
Skeleton Crew is about four kids from a boring suburban planet — the Star Wars version of Orange County — who stumble into an adventure and are whisked off into a dangerous, exciting world beyond their imagination, where they meet Space Jack Sparrow, a charming but untrustworthy pirate captain played by Jude Law. The show is unsubtly, even shamelessly influenced by the same ‘80s movies as Stranger Things, like E.T. and The Goonies.
I have very mixed feelings about the entire Skeleton Crew project. On the one hand, the theoretically cool promise of the Disney+ Star Wars shows is that they can be different from the movies and explore smaller stories in different genres and be “the Star Wars version of ___,” which is exactly what Skeleton Crew is. It’s legitimately doing something Star Wars hasn’t done before. On the other hand, what it’s doing — a Spielberg homage — is something that Netflix’s biggest show has been doing for almost a decade. Seeing Star Wars chase Stranger Things is disheartening and shows how much cultural cachet the franchise has lost. There’s just something so corny about fusing Star Wars with another type of blockbuster that Star Wars itself influenced. Skeleton Crew plays it safe and lacks vision.
It’s so hard to be Star Wars right now. The shows need to be different from the Star Wars movies, but we’re finding that the parameters for what Star Wars can be are actually pretty narrow, and the stakes and standards are astronomically high. That’s why Lucasfilm is having such a hard time coming up with workable ideas for Star Wars movies, and why the shows aren’t catching on. Star Wars needs to have grandeur. It needs to feel epic, or else it doesn’t feel like Star Wars. It needs to have archetypal characters that feel mythic. If it falls short of mythic, it falls short. And Skeleton Crew doesn’t feel mythic. I don’t want to see suburbs in Star Wars. It’s a well-executed and authentic Amblin homage, but it’s an Amblin homage nonetheless, and therefore it doesn’t work as Star Wars.
(Andor, of course, is the mature, morally complex spy thriller is the exception that proves the rule about what can be Star Wars. Anything can be anything if it’s good enough, and comparatively few people will watch it.)
But like I said before, I have mixed feelings. Because I actually enjoy watching Skeleton Crew. It’s terrifically well-made. The pacing, the world-building, the casting and dynamics between the kids, it’s all executed with a very high level of competence. The elephant kid is very cute and I like looking at him. It’s fun that Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio is the one kid’s harried dad (I don’t know anybody’s names). Nobody talks about TV on the Radio anymore, but I still love them. It has an A24-ass murderer’s row of directors: Watts, David Lowery, the Daniels, Jake Schrier, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Lee Isaac Chung. It’s a perfect show for families to watch together.
It’s a good show, it’s just not what I’m looking for from Star Wars. Maybe if it were as good as Andor I wouldn’t have any mixed feelings, but alas. I don’t know how to articulate what I’m looking for from present-day Star Wars other than “feels like Star Wars but isn’t something I’ve seen before,” but I’ll know it when I see it.
I reviewed the series finale of Yellowstone for TV Guide. It’s a crazy show, man.
The legality of selling the ranch at an extreme below-market rate for tax avoidance purposes might be questionable in real life, but reality has never been Yellowstone's thing. Yellowstone is about emotion over everything, and narrative coherence is secondary, which has always been a double-edged sword. When the emotional storytelling clicks, it's thrilling and distinctive; it's the currency on which Sheridan has built his empire. When it doesn't, it creates frustrating, baffling TV, like the episode before the finale. The finale is right at the midpoint between thrilling and frustrating. Everything that happens makes sense for the characters, which is satisfying, but it happens in such a neat way that it's not particularly exciting to watch. And there's so much of it that it feels overly indulgent. There's no way that a TV writer-director without Sheridan's clout would get away with having a funeral scene where almost every character gets to give a little goodbye speech to the deceased's coffin.
Check out the whole thing here.
I don’t italicize Star Wars because I consider it to be a genre.