Star Wars Rebels

Essential, and it is the show the live-action series now depend on. Ahsoka is close to unwatchable without it: that series continues this one's plot, resolves its cliffhanger, and assumes you know four characters it does not reintroduce.

On its own it is a smaller, warmer programme than The Clone Wars. The scale is one ship with a crew of five, the Empire is an occupying force on one planet before it becomes a galaxy-wide war, and the first season is pitched noticeably younger, with a teenage protagonist and a format closer to adventure serial than to anything in the films.

It grows considerably. By the third and fourth seasons it is doing long-form work on a Jedi who was never finished as a student teaching one who never will be, on an Imperial officer whose competence is the scariest thing about him, and on what the Force actually is, in a late sequence involving a space outside time that is the strangest idea in canon. Thrawn, imported from the pre-Disney novels, is the best Imperial antagonist in any medium.

Seventy-five episodes at twenty-two minutes. Watch it after The Clone Wars, since it continues several of its threads, and before Ahsoka, which continues this one's.