Andor (Season 1)

Essential, and the best thing anyone has made with this licence. It is also the entry most likely to be recommended to people who do not like Star Wars, because almost nothing that usually defines the franchise is in it: no Jedi, no lightsabers, no Force, no Skywalkers, and no destiny.

What it has instead is an account of how an empire works at ground level. A corporate security force polices a company town badly. A bureaucrat climbs the Imperial Security Bureau by being better at paperwork than her rivals. A man is sentenced to six years for being near an incident and discovers that nobody is ever released. The prison arc in the middle of the season, in which the sentence is revealed to be administrative rather than judicial, is the most frightening stretch of television the franchise has produced, and nothing supernatural happens in it.

Tony Gilroy wrote it as a political thriller and the dialogue is in a different register from anything else here. Stellan Skarsgård's speech about what he has sacrificed to the cause, delivered alone to a mirror, and Nemik's manifesto are both written to be reread.

It needs nothing before it and it leads directly into Rogue One, which it improves substantially. Twelve episodes, structured as four three-part films. If you watch one thing on this page, watch this.