Andor

A peaceful protest turns violent at the hands of trigger-happy riot police. Undocumented immigrants fear for their lives and livelihoods when workplace raids become commonplace. A senator rails against the loss of “truth” as she worries that the government’s genocidal lies have become harder and harder to ignore. Resistance factions fracture and coalesce with equal ease as an Empire consolidates power with violence and impunity. It’s not that season two of Andor (a Peabody award winner back in 2023 for its thrilling freshman season) was conceived as a timely response to what is happening in 2026 around the world (and the United States in particular). On the contrary, Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars prequel series merely mapped out the tried and true tropes of the rise of fascism within a galaxy far, far away and found, upon its release, how such prescience came not from reacting to current news events but from understanding and fictionalizing well-documented historical precedents. For further expanding one of the most successful Hollywood franchises about resistance to fascistic enterprises to create a complex and urgent portrait of the human cost of what it means to rebel, Andor: A Star Wars Story wins a Peabody award.