Screens

Any showrunner, TV writer, film writer, knows when they're cut a corner. And then it's just the amount of corners that you can get away with. The minimum viable amount of corners cut that you can get away. The remarkable thing about Andor is that Gilroy finds a way to go around each and every corner and find a solution — he reroutes the architecture of the show to solve every problem the long way, the hard way, and the right way.

What Andor proves, maybe accidentally, is when audiences recalibrate their expectations and they will— it raises the floor. Suddenly, the algorithmic slop starts to feel like noise. You tune it out. With Zirp it made sense (in a cynical way) to flood the zone with disposable content and hope something stuck. But now, with capital more expensive and audience burnout the bar has risen. Slop doesn’t just underperform artistically — it’s starting to look like a bad investment. Gilroy didn’t just make great TV; he quietly exposed the rot of the current ROI