I gave Andor a try. The only "new" Star Wars thing of the Disney era I have seen since the travesty that was The Force Awakens. My expectations were low given Disney's abysmal record, but I gave it a chance because internet buzz claims this is the "good" one. (I shudder to think how awful the others must be.)
First of all, this isn't Star Wars. Not even remotely. Sure, they reference the Empire occasionally, and you might catch a glimpse of Han Solo's blaster or hear the hologram sound effect, but that's about as far as the connection goes. Otherwise, this is just some director's pet project that he realized would never see the light of day in this anti-originality media world we live in that only likes "franchises" (sequels, remakes, reboots, etc.) so he pitched his idea as a Star Wars spinoff just to get it made, and by some miracle of luck some executive was ignorant enough about Star Wars to think this could work.
Is it any good?
Ha. Haha. Hahaha. Nope.
It's boring as hell. Never have I seen anything with such intolerably slow pacing that I went, "You know what, I would actually be seeing more action by reading a Star Wars book." Books are supposed to have the slower pacing, to last all 300 or however many pages. Tv is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end all inside of 40 minutes. The pilot episode felt like it got through not even the first chapter of a book! Then the episode just ends abruptly. You don't even get a sense of closure or even a pause. Also, three whole minutes of credits? It's a tv episode, not a movie for Christ's sake.
The first thing any movie or tv show ought to do in the first 20-30 minutes (of the pilot if it's tv) is answer the questions: who the characters are, what they're trying to do, why, and why the audience should care. Those four questions ought to be so obvious that I as the audience should never have to ask them. But Andor doesn't set up any of that. I have no earthly idea what's going on, who these people are, or why I should be remotely interested in any of it. All the characters have this backstory and relationships that I know nothing about, and the writers just expect that I should know what's going on. I feel like I started the movie in the middle of it, not at the beginning.
And that feeling doesn't go away in the second episode. Feeling confused yet? Don't worry, the solution is to then drop even more trivial, uninteresting characters whom you have no idea who they are and will never get an explanation for. I would ask what their relevance to the plot is, but two episodes and 60 minutes in I still myself don't know what the plot is.
Something about finding Andor's sister, but he killed two guys for some reason, and now we're spending all this focus on the cops who want to take him down so badly, but Andor has this sexual tension with this friend who's setting up a buy, but her boyfriend gets jealous of Andor, and then we have to see their drama, and jesus christ get to the fricking point already! They can't even show the childhood flashbacks, because even that has to be dragged out at a glacial pace.
You know what it feels like? It's not like a movie or a tv show. It's like an RPG that lasts about 100 hours, and you're doing some pointless task for a boring NPC, only to encounter yet another stupid NPC and her questline, and so on and so on and you quickly get bogged down in 50 different sub-plots which you're never going to remember and were never that interesting to begin with, all to service a stupidly long 30 hour main plot-line you're never going to reach the end of because you get bored and give it up after about an hour or two.
Is this what modern, streaming shows are like? Sheesh man, Netflix ruined tv.