The Mandalorian (Season 1)

Essential as the start of the live-action television era, and it assumes almost nothing. A viewer who has seen the original trilogy and nothing else will follow every episode.

The format is the point. Jon Favreau built it as a western serial: a man with a job, a different planet each week, a problem that can be solved in forty minutes, and a long thread underneath. After four decades of films about a single family, a show about somebody with no connection to any of it was a considerable relief, and the first season is the purest version of that idea before the wider continuity arrives.

The craft is high. It was among the first major productions shot against a volume of LED walls rather than green screen, which is why the deserts and ice fields look lit rather than composited, and the creature work is practical wherever it can be. Ludwig Göransson's score sounds like nothing else in the franchise.

What it has that nothing else here does is restraint: a protagonist whose face you do not see and who says very little, which forces the storytelling into behaviour. The child introduced at the end of the first episode became a global phenomenon within a week and the show was, briefly, the most talked-about thing on television.