On this week’s episode, Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason) discuss Spencer Kornhaber’s feature in The Atlantic asking if this is the worst period of American pop culture ever. Then they review the first nine episodes of Andor ahead of the series finale that hits Disney+ today. (Some spoilers through the ninth episode, but none for the last three, which debut at 9 p.m. Eastern time.) Make sure to swing by Bulwark+ for a bonus episode on Sinners and The Studio. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!
I've not yet seen "Andor," though am planning to see it, and am only marginally invested in the Star Wars universe, so I forwarded this discussion to my 30-yr-old son, who has some thoughts:
"Okay I shouldn't have listened to this right before I was about to go to bed but I listened to this all and came away annoyed at several points they made.
1. The whole opening conversation on music being all boring and uninteresting mush just made me frustrated because they gave several examples that were all pop-related or genres that were popular pre-90's and I'm just sitting here like "the metal scene now is by far the most interesting it has ever been and these people have no idea." And like, they don't need to know that. But then don't declare something broadly to be true. Also the followup conversation where they were like baffled that if there is any form of popular media it's Youtube just struck me as "older people don't understand what the kids are into" despite the fact these people don't exactly sound super old.
2. They kept saying Andor is political but not "directly tied into things happening now." What?? The first arc of season 2 directly has the empire going through a farming planet looking for people who are there illegally to remove them. How in any possible interpretation can you not say that's obvious current events commentary? And they are all thinking it's "funny" that one planet is just France and like....yeah. That whole plotline is a pretty obvious nod to the French Resistance against the Nazis. Did they not know that?
3. Most annoyingly of all, they said multiple times that previous Disney Star Wars media never had any nuance like this and Disney treated it as a dumb kids thing. That is just not true, but I can see why some people would say that if A. they didn't really know the wider context of certain shows, and B. that they didn't watch any of the animated shows. The animated show The Bad Batch is about a group of clones trying to survive after Palpatine takes over and, yes, it's animated but it's not some dumb kiddy thing. There are multiple episodes focusing on one character who goes back to serve the empire because he's a soldier so that's what he's supposed to do and how he mentally struggles with that and dealing with his own identity. There's a moment where a rebel cell (you know, the "good guys") end up fucking up a plan so bad that one of the main characters has to sacrifice himself so the others don't also die, and these guys are praising Andor for "showing how the rebellion is not just full of heroes" and yeah, it is a cool thing Andor does. Why are you pretending that every other Star Wars property doesn't do this? It's because they didn't watch the animated thing because "durr hurr animated stuff is for kids" which is a mentality that needs to die. One of the single best examples of character writing I have ever seen was for a show about princesses who use the power of friendship.
There's probably way more I can say but I'm tired and now grumpy."
Regarding today's music, I agree and here's but one reason why you can blame Spotify as discussed in Harper's magazine article "The Ghosts in the Machine" by Liz Pelly (https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/).
Rick Beato discusses why music is so boring, or bad, depending on how much you hate it, in a few videos, that also discuss AI, such as these:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks4c_A0Ach8
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM4sEl8avug
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibMd_Jx9daw
There are others (Gioia was mentioned, he's interviewed by Rick Beato in those videos). IMO, music today is very derivative, for the reasons discussed above, and will just get more derivative because of AI.
Love Andor! Thanks for covering it. All fiction has echoes in reality…it’s super enjoyable on its own merits and I found it distracting to try and connect its plot lines to current events. The acting and character development is top notch.
I'm enjoying Andor. It's not Wolf Hall, but it's getting closer. Are stans complaining about offenses against "the canon"? Don't care.
If you want to talk about the stagnation in pop culture, here’s Kurt Anderson from almost 15 years ago. And it’s gotten worse.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201
Sonny can complain all he wants about people comparing the politics of Andor to today’s political climate, but it is kind of hard not to with lines like this…
“The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.”
“When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest.”
Peter’s ability to find new ways to describe hell each week is admirable. He sounds so cheery as he describes this tech-based hell too!
Anyway, don’t cry to me about a stagnant culture. I was alive from 2000 to 2007-ish. That was a bleak time!
Pop music may be in a rut but the metal world is on fire!
The most interesting comparison I have heard recently was Andor is to the rest of Star Wars as Le Carre is to James Bond.
Can't say enough about how absolutely I love this show - the production design, the acting, the direction are all worth the money Disney spent on it. The skill and complexity with which aspects of a rebellion are dramatized on screen is so enjoyable to watch. l loved the scenes of the rebels stranded on Yavin, but also the scenes with Saw Gerrera. The ways in which rebels engage with rebellion is different for each group we are introduced to, and I am hopeful that the last three episodes dramatize how these separate groups slowly come together to fight the empire.
And I love the way Peter, Sonny and Alyssa talked about the show rhyming with current politics, but not being a one-for-one transposition. Mon Mothma's speech and escape from the Senate building for instance, are good examples of scenes where the show is able to generate a large amount of emotional impact by playing with these political themes.
I was hoping you would cover this show in the podcast - so happy that you did!
Not to be That Guy, but the explanation for the post-Microsoft antitrust case market based on the emergence of the smartphone is ahistorical. The suit completed in 2001, but the iPhone wasn’t introduced until 2007, with Android the following year.
Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, revitalizing the non-Microsoft desktop market, coincided with Linux toppling Microsoft’s dominance in the low-cost server space. MacOS X became the preferred operating system for knowledge-worker elites, and Powerbooks and iMacs the preferred desktop. The Mac was and has remained a luxury option, but it broke Microsoft’s monolithic stranglehold on the desktop market. In the server space, Linux actually overtook Windows quite handily.¹
These things happened coincidentally with the end of the antitrust case and got little (but some!) benefit from it, so that much of the argument is mostly true. It just couldn’t have been mobile that did it — the timelines don’t match.
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¹ So much so that for years, many servers were sold only with Windows bundled and pre-installed (talk about an antitrust question!), and yet people still gladly replaced the OS they’d paid for with Linux.
No foul in being the history guy! Has been my superpower. I tell newer db staff I’m no smarter than them just been around thru all the mods & kept good notes. My collegiate shops pledged allegiance to MS. Macs very popular stand alone in the creative depts but not allowed onto client-server network where I’d’a seen em. Ahhh memories
“I don’t like the question, even though I came up with it” is *such* a Sonny thing to say.
Suderman’s on the changing culture take is so grim. We traded The Godfather for Skibidi toilet and that’s not stagnation and decline?
I think Dedra may be the most fully realized, most human character that we've ever seen working for the Empire.
And the speech that Mon's husband gives at the wedding is unexpectedly touching and real.
The downfall started with the shuffle option on your mp3 player, listen to the album the way it was released, skip is an option.