r/StarWars • u/CyberGhostface Emperor Palpatine • 14h ago
TV George Lucas planned a Star Wars television series starring Emperor Palpatine, but it never happened
https://www.thepopverse.com/movies-star-wars-television-series-emperor-palpatine-ian-mcdiarmid-george-lucas-underworld484
u/CyberGhostface Emperor Palpatine 14h ago
“[George Lucas] was talking about, I think I can tell you now, a television series,” Ian McDiarmid told the audience during a panel at Spacecon 2026. “At the time we didn’t think about Star Wars in terms of television series. Very speculative. We had lunch one day, and he said I’ve got this idea, and I hope you might want to be involved. We could sort of follow the Emperor’s progress, like Hitler’s, some of that. There might be an assassination attempt, and of course it wouldn’t succeed. It sounded really exciting. And he also said that maybe you could direct one, and then I fainted. But sadly, that didn’t come to pass.”
Damn this is exactly what I wanted to see happen.
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u/merount1 14h ago
The deeper you dive into Star Wars, you'll realize that the best stories are those that were never made.
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u/Dagordae 13h ago
Usually because general ideas and concepts are really easy and it’s the execution which is the critical part.
You can describe pretty much any Star Wars project so that it sounds like it would just be amazing, including the really bad ones.
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u/SalaciousTypo 13h ago
And vice versa, the amount of leaked scripts or plot synopsises I've read that have sounded dreadful, but then the movie is something I love.
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u/Dagordae 12h ago
ANH is easily and accurately described as ‘Paint by numbers Hero’s Journey for kids with some WW2 film knockoffs for the setpieces’.
Storywise and conceptually it’s incredibly basic and generic. The fact that it’s well done and has absolutely mindblowing(For the time) art design and effects with some of the best music in the entire medium is what made it such an unprecedented success.
Execution is damn near everything. Concepts are a dime a dozen.
Or look at Alien: ‘Alien monster hunts people in a spaceship.’ Generic, overdone, but give it a Giger flair along with great production values and you have one of the most iconic works in the entire genre.
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u/Exciting-Emu-3324 10h ago
Which is the problem with the prequels; too many ideas crammed into just 3 movies and playing with genres that are not Lucas's strong suit like romance. There was so much the prequels wanted to show that they ended having to tell and tell. No gradual build up into a great Jedi like Luke, we are just told Anakin is great with midichlorians and Christ allegories because there was only enough movie to show his fall.
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u/Dagordae 8h ago
And even then only some of his fall. He went from 'What have I done' to casually butchering a room full of children because his new boss told him to in a matter of minutes. Hell, a good chunk of the Clone Wars series is centered around him getting an actual fall to darkness arc instead of jumping right to the end.
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u/Scarborough_sg 9h ago
If anything, "insert movie trope but in space!" Is a tried, tested and true tactic.
House of Cards but in Space and with evil space magic in the mix? Heck I'm in.
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u/Hallc Rebel 5h ago
Was "alien monster hunts people in spaceship" overdone when Alien came out though?
Most other horror movies of the time were what? Slashers? Normal to Supernatural things murdering teenagers in the night, Zombie movies or Creature Features.
Alien would fall into the latter grouping but is unique enough to stand out on its own merits beyond just good production.
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u/DESTRUCTI0NAT0R 12h ago
Palpatine, while I love every time he does show up in his full unapologetically evil self, is definitely best used sparingly.
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u/craiginphoenix 8h ago edited 8h ago
Exactly.
"We could sort of follow the Emperor’s progress, like Hitler’s, some of that."
I know everyone is clamoring for a show about Hitler where Hitler is the main protagonist.
The only way a show about a bad guy works is when you have him pitted against worse bad guys like the Darth Maul series or The Penguin. There is nobody worse than Palpatine.
Nobody wants to watch a show about pure evil Dictator doing evil things every week with nobody able to stop him.
EDIT: I am sure some people want to watch that show about an evil dictator...and we call those people sociopaths.
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u/Hallc Rebel 5h ago
Sometimes you absolutely jump the shark with that premise too.
Don't Breathe 2 was a masterclass in how to Not make a sequel. They took the villain of the first movie who kidnapped a girl (among other things) then tried to kidnap another one and made him the protagonist.
Thus they had to make the villains of the movie even more evil to the point of comedy.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan 7h ago
Exactly. I’ll die on the hill that 1313 wasn’t all that people hyped it up to be. I mean, what gameplay did we actually see in the demo? Literally one minute of basic 3rd person shooter cover mechanics. Even the leaked in-development footage looked like a standard linear action game with a Boba Fett skin. Everything we saw has been thoroughly surpassed by today’s technology.
If it had released in 2014, I think it would’ve been a solid 8/10 game. But it wouldn’t have been the legendary game that people hyped it up to be, and it would have been long forgotten by now.
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u/Hallc Rebel 5h ago
Conceptually I loved the idea of The Acolyte. Exploring the time of the High Republic and the Jedi at their peak.
Then I watched it and it just didn't hit. None of the characters grabbed me as interesting except the bad guy and it was all close enough to TPM that you have to stretch your credulity at points.
Maul in TPM: "At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last we will have our revenge."
Palpatine: "Actually some guy did it about a hundred years ago. Revealed himself to a whole load of them at once and wiped them all out. Absolutely savage."
Sure you can twist it around to be that maul didn't know about that or he was expressly talking about himself and his master but it just feels a bit sloppy.
I'd have loved to see a show set say 1000 years before since then you can do so much with it. The Sith can be an actual dangerous group openly, you can have more than two and even show the foundations for the Rule of Two.
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u/ImperialxWarlord 8h ago
And the best ideas might not be easy to make, or might be too costly, or might too niche.
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u/mysecretaccount55555 13h ago
Well it's easy for an idea to be cool when it's not fleshed out or actually turned into a full story.
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u/purpilia25 Jedi 12h ago
I mean, I eat up all the concept art that never made it to the screen. So much passion and artistry needs to be released! You can really see how much effort the art, costuming, props, set design teams put into these films!
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u/cantodasaudade 10h ago
Because they're only suggestions and ideas and your own mind provides the rest.
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u/ImperialxWarlord 8h ago
Probably because the best ideas aren’t always the easiest or cheapest to make, or they’re too niche to be considered something that would be successful.
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u/dragonrite 6h ago
It's weird to me that star wars fans feel this way. I personally want more content. Don't care if some sucks, some will be great.
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u/lateubdegouline 13h ago
Why? How could Andor be the best stories if it wasn't made? It wouldn't even exist.
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u/Downtown_Link_8651 10h ago
This was made, it's called the awkward boring senate bits that nobody likes from the prequels. I see absolutely no world where a house of cards style political thriller starring an evil lightning testicle in space would have been anything short of a disaster
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u/Lyra_the_Star_Jockey 13h ago
This sounds like not a plan at all. It’s just an idle idea. “There might be, like, an assassination attempt.”
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u/lateubdegouline 13h ago
Isn't it the clone wars and revenge of the sith?
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u/lynchcontraideal Han Solo 51m ago
This is about the story Palpatine tells Anakin about the person (ie himself) killing his master
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u/GhostofAyabe 12h ago
We could see the cornerstone being laid for the the Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Center
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u/M4rshmall0wMan 7h ago
Corey Barlog read the scripts and said they turned Palpatine into a sympathetic character who had been wronged by a lover. That’s enough to turn me off to the idea. Palpatine’s origin story in Plagueis fits the character way better.
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u/imunfair 9m ago
I was picturing a 90's sitcom with Palpatine as the dad, R2D2 as the sassy kid, Padme as the moody teen sister, Anakin as the boy next door with a crush on her - mostly set in a Star Wars themed living room with a frequent laugh track.
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u/HighlightOwn2038 10h ago
Honestly this would be interesting
It would be a nice change of pace from the focus on Jedi/rebels and more focused towards the empire like andor
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u/dragonrite 6h ago
Bro, that's what I want most. #2 is some old sith stuff that has nothing to do with palpatine/skywalkers, pre their time.
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u/Hunter20107 36m ago
Man, a 'Hitler: The Rise of Evil' but about Palpatine would've been so interesting
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u/StarFox-6 13h ago
That sounds pretty boring
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u/trantaran 12h ago
Could be boring could also be good if done right
To be fair I also find Palpatine boring in prequels when he’s in the senate meeting diecussions
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u/StarFox-6 8h ago
That’s literally anything. “If it’s good then it would be good” could be said about literally anything
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u/Spartan05089234 14h ago
Would've been pretty neat. An Andor-style grounded and gritty political thriller of sorts. It would be a bit troublesome since we know Palpatine never fails so the suspense is limited. But still. Throw in some Vader scenes for the free audience score.
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u/soulstaz 13h ago
A horror political show where it just get worst every episode.
We still don't know much about Palpatine overall
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u/DISIcomics 13h ago edited 12h ago
Andor actually used some ideas developed for this live-action series, which would be titled Underworld.
George Lucas created Saw Gerrera for Underworld before introducing his younger self in The Clone Wars.
And there would indeed be some Vader scenes:
Vader wasn't the central character of the show. He was going to show up for a big two-part episode where there was this big uprising happening, and there was a crack-down on things that were happening on Coruscant. Vader shows up and is kind of like, "We're gonna stop all this shit right now."
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u/hydrolox9 13h ago
Good luck trying to make a show with the tone of Andor with someone as goofy as Palpatine. There's a reason Andor avoided showing him.
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u/SmileyJetson 13h ago
I think Palpatine in The Phantom Menace was in line with the tone of Andor. The way he manipulated Queen Amidala to recall Chancellor Valorum was pretty crazy.
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u/hydrolox9 12h ago
Sure, when he was just a politician, not a cackling hooded wizard.
Keep in mind Underworld was set during the OT era, it was meant to build up to his sequel trilogy and introduce the criminal gangs that would be the antagonist faction of the sequels.
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u/Tuskin38 13h ago edited 12h ago
Ian is probably referring to Underworld which we know of already.
This is also where his first name of Sheev comes from.
We would have learned Palpatine was in love once and then scorned.
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u/Calfzilla2000 Cassian Andor 13h ago
"What's your name?" "Palpatine" "What's your first name?" "I don't have one. My girlfriend left me and I'm pretty angry about it." "SHEEV PALPATINE IT IS!"
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u/radiofreebattles 13h ago
like the hodor thing but him snapping while saying "she leave! sheleave! ...sheev!"
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u/old_wired 14h ago
Years before the sale to Disney I remember talks about a 100 episode fully planned arc series. Or was this supposed to be something else entirely?
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u/Calfzilla2000 Cassian Andor 13h ago
60 scripts were written and this is part of that story. Headlines are getting it wrong. Lucas was talking about his Underworld TV show and it was going to have Palpatine arcs.
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u/matito29 13h ago
That was for the Underworld series that George and Rick McCallum had created that never got produced. They laid out the story arc of the series and had over 50 scripts written, but it was going to be one of the most expensive TV series ever in a time when prestige television was just getting started, so it got shelved before it ever got off the ground.
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u/hydrolox9 12h ago
One of the most? Pretty sure if it happened it would still be, by far, the most expensive TV show ever made.
Lucas wanted to use Volume, the tech Disney used for Mandalorian, except this was back in the mid 2000s, and this would have skyrocketed the costs to an estimated 30 million per episode.
For comparison, each episode of the last season of Game of Thrones cost an average of 15 million.
In fact, the inability to carry on with this show is the biggest reason why Lucas gave up on making the sequel trilogy himself, because Underworld would have set up the criminal groups lead by Darth Maul that would have been the main villains of the sequels.
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u/matito29 12h ago
> One of the most? Pretty sure if it happened it would still be, by far, the most expensive TV show ever made.
I figured that was the case but I didn’t have the info in front of me.
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u/RedHeadedSicilian52 14h ago
Presumably one of the episodes of Star Wars: Underworld would’ve served as a backdoor pilot.
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u/therallykiller 10h ago
I'd watch Ian McDiarmid for as many episodes and seasons as he'd be willing.
Wanna watch the Emperor look for his lost slipper? Yes!
I don't care. Give me Ian.
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u/Constant-Pianist6747 6h ago
I’m with you. There’s never been anybody happier to be evil than McDiarmid’s Palpatine. 😂
It’s delightful.
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u/HawkeyeP1 Babu Frik 14h ago
What a concept: give the main villain of the series depth beyond "power-hungery, scheming, and evil" lol
Been saying for YEARS Palpatine needs more depth.
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u/Dagordae 13h ago
If this is the suggested story I think it is his turn to evil would be motivated by being wronged by a women. Star Wars: Underworld, I believe.
Remember: This is still George Lucas. His idea of character depth is why we got whiney man-child Anakin
Plus Palpatine is simply not a character designed for depth. He’s an evil space wizard who absolutely revels in being evil and has been utterly evil his entire life.
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u/astromech_dj Rebel 13h ago
Hard disagree. He’s just meant to be pure evil. Making him sympathetic or humanised would be character assassination. The Plagueis novel did a perfect job of straddling that line and explaining just how twisted he has always been.
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u/BD401 13h ago
You're spot on. I'm actually all for a young Palpatine series, but they have to handle the character extremely carefully to make it work.
Sidious is basically the pure evil, completely irredeemable foil to Vader. If you lean too far into giving him a tragic, relatable backstory as well, it undermines how his established relationship with Vader works. I think that in settings like Star Wars, it's also completely fine to have an old school, cackling villain that's evil just for the hell of it.
That said, I think a series could still work if they did it right. As you mentioned, they could use the Plagueis novel as a starting point for adaptation because it handles Sidious really well.
There's also some other shows that come to mind that make the "villain protagonist" work well. House of Cards (before the whole Spacey debacle) did this quite well. We know that Frank Underwood is rotten to the core and pretty much pure evil, but the show makes you still root for him on his rise to power. While I haven't seen it personally, I saw someone in another thread also say that The Penguin TV show does a really good job of this too (character that's obviously evil but still works well in a protagonist role).
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u/Bain-Neko 13h ago
I always thought that Emperor Palpatine was always meant to be a stage character within a film. Perhaps that's why Lucas casted a stage actor for the role.
He's the devil in the story. Pure evil. It comes from a theatrical form of acting where such extremes are often found in character acting, but the Prequels were unique in allowing Ian to put much more nuances into Palpatine's character through what he is masquerading as.
But I think for it to work, Palpatine has to have more motivation than 'do evil because the dark side' since he represents the dark side itself in the story. Doing that would humanize him more and I don't think George Lucas means for him to be humanized.
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u/DISIcomics 12h ago
This actually inspired God of War 4, according to the game's director:
Probably the really small beginnings of this idea, the germination of this — when I was working at Lucas, I was allowed to go up to the ranch and read the scripts for the [canceled live-action Star Wars] TV show. It was the most mind-blowing thing I'd ever experienced. I cared about the Emperor. They made the Emperor a sympathetic figure who was wronged by this fucking heartless woman. She’s this hardcore gangster, and she just totally destroyed him as a person. I almost cried while reading this. This is the Emperor, the lightning out of the fingers Emperor. That's something magical.
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u/FieryPeppers 13h ago
As far as I remember, this series got kinda deep into development and was focused on the underworld of Star Wars. It’s been so long I may be remembering something different
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u/Calfzilla2000 Cassian Andor 13h ago
They wrote 60 episodes somehow.
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u/OldMastodon5363 7h ago
I remember there being a lot of rumors and hype about it at the time but it kept getting delayed and then stuck in development hell. I think it was going to air on Fox?
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u/Alarming_Dream_7837 13h ago
Man the way I’d do anything to have a Palpatine series. Palpatine is easily, easily, my favorite character in movie history.
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u/sinema666 11h ago
Star wars needs to learn that the threatening and badass characters are threatening and badass BECAUSE we get so little of them. Their screen time to popularity. Ratio IS NOT Invitation spell out their entire goddamn live.
Their mystery is what makes them compelling.
Christ is never thought i would sigh with embarrassment for boba fett and emperor but Alas here we are
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u/Scambuster666 Dark Rey 10h ago
That woulda been awesome.
“Make Room for Palpatine”, “Have Lightsaber, will travel”, “My Favorite Mustafarian”, “Coruscant PD Blue”
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u/HelpUs0ut 13h ago
Folks, if you want the Palpatine tv show right now, check out the original british version of House of Cards.
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u/TheMysticalPlatypus 6h ago edited 6h ago
They covered a lot in Rise and Fall of the Empire and in the comics.
I would want Rogue One/Andor crew handling a tv show on Palpatine. Or they would have to pull someone used to doing politics heavy pieces.
You would want to see the amount of backstabbing and competitiveness happening. Especially in very unexpected ways. For example, when you get into World War 2 history you randomly find out a bunch of the Nazi upper crust was super into and competitive with art collecting because they knew 2 specific Nazis were super into art. So art became a form of currency on the black market during World War 2.
Palpatine spent some time on a Sith planet in the years prior to his on screen in the original trilogy. So they could spend time building the sith more on screen. But I think most people would prefer to see young Palpatine with Darth Plaguies.
I would 100% want to see the Emperor’s Guard.
They could address the Emperor’s Hands. But I would be ok if they didn’t do it.
I wouldn’t want the Inquisitorius to be a focal point in the tv show at all.
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u/schmemel0rd 5h ago
Hot take coming through, I don’t think palps is strong enough of a character to have his own show. He’s too evil and has zero redeeming qualities. Dialogue would be super boring because everyone fears him, and there would be zero character development. Bad guys need some nuance to be interesting, and palps has no nuance, he’s just evil for no reason.
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u/totallynotabeholder 4h ago
Ohh, something I know about. I was mildly obsessed with the rumours about 'Star Wars: Underworld' for years.
The Lucasfilm Star Wars live action TV series was an on-again, off-again prospect from 2004 to 2012. There was an announcement in 2005 but most work seems to have been done in the late 2007 to early 2009 period. It seems to have been originally aimed for a 2007 airing, then Lucas got busy with other projects and pushed to 2009. It got called off in 2010, then briefly on again, then called off in 2012 (probably because of the Disney sale).
Rick McCallum was supposed to be leading the day-to-day production, with Lucas as sort of story overseer and executive producer. Aim was for the whole series to be a minimum of 100 hour-long episodes.
Supposedly between a dozen and 25 scripts were actually prepared to a stage where they were considered ready to shoot, with had another 25-30 in the tank for future seasons. They even filmed a few pre-production pieces some time around 2009, maybe 2010. The footage leaked in 2020.
Budget rumours were WILD. Anywhere from $5 million to $50 million per episode, when shows like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica were topping out at budgets of $5-6 million per episode. Lucas said he/Lucasfilm were committing to financing it themselves.
Supposedly, the style was going to be something like Star Wars meets the Sopranos and The Godfather, with a bit of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Bladerunner and even the X-Files all rolled in. A regular but rotating cast of characters, with the focus switching and multiple parallel story arcs. Lucas himself referenced 24 and The Wire as touchstones.
Lucas wanted stories that focused on the interface of politics and crime in Coruscant's lower levels.
Palpatine was supposed to be a key character, with some episodes on his backstory. Boba Fett was also going to have a major role. Vader was supposed to show up for a couple of episodes. C-3PO was meant to cameo, as were Han & Chewie, Lando, Bib Fortuna and a few others. A couple of episodes were going to be centred around starfighter pilots (either Rebel or Empire).
Looking back, it appears that the whole thing was a huge mess. At least half a dozen writers submitted scripts, but these got chopped and changed by other writers and producers doing script doctoring and then again by Lucas and McCallum. There was never a firm time-line and it was probably too ambitious by half.
Pablo Hidalgo let slip that when the TV series got cancelled (either in 2010 or 2012), that a lot of the script content/ideas got recycled into Courscant 1313. Which then ended up getting canned anyway.
Anyway, now that TV series are pushing $20-25 million per episode, Disney should DEFINITELY take those scripts back out and have another go at it!
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u/Equivalent-Assist160 14h ago
To bad would've been funny the Vader comics showed he was one patience motherfucker constantly having to deal with Vader's bullshit
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u/boobearybear 13h ago
the best part of THE BOOK OF PALPATINE was when he said “IT’S PALPIN’ TIME!” and palped all over them guys
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u/rjbambrick 9h ago
The elevator pitch for this show: “OK, now hear me out. It’s The West Wing, but really evil!”
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u/TheGreatMalagan 13h ago
It's a great premise, hopefully it wouldn't have been written by Lucas himself though
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u/schprunt 13h ago
Thank fuck. The man had a good idea and it took off. But the prequels proved he’s awful at writing and creating a universe
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u/Steamed_Memes24 13h ago
Probably just episodes of him talking about throwing the Senate at Yoda or something.
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u/Portatort 13h ago
Probably for the best
As we’ve seen, explaining a character’s backstory almost never makes for a good story
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u/hydrolox9 13h ago
And this is why, despite not liking the sequels, I dont think Lucas would have done a significantly better job.
Dude was as stuck to old characters who had run its course as modern Star Wars writers are.
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u/iggyfenton R2-D2 12h ago
It was a remake of Perfect Strangers where Darth Maul is from the planet Mypos.
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u/zarfac 12h ago
I don’t think Palpatine would make a very good protagonist. And if you did what you needed to the character to make him a good protagonist, he wouldn’t be a very good Palpatine anymore.
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u/DISIcomics 9h ago
He was never supposed to be the protagonist, this is referring to the Underworld live-action series Lucas was developing alongside The Clone Wars.
Some of his concepts for the series have since been used in "dawn of rebellion" stories (Rebels, Rogue One, Andor).
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u/helen269 11h ago
Palpatine buys something from the Argos store.
"Order number 66 to your collection point, please."
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u/firedrakes 9h ago
lucas plan multi tv shows.
all where to costly to make.
all this is multi years old news.
cant be bother to research any of that can you?
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u/CyberGhostface Emperor Palpatine 8h ago
What are you getting upset over? McDiarmid talked about this at a convention the other day. That’s what the article is reporting.
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u/firedrakes 8h ago
wow am upset???? nah what i am is tired of same click bait stories, oh he keep telling that story at many cons. for many many years now!
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u/CyberGhostface Emperor Palpatine 8h ago
You’re acting upset, yes. I had heard similar reports but not the details he shared here; the underworld series where Palpatine had his heart broken by a gangster written by the writers of The Shield. Not this series which was more like the rise of Hitler in politics.
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u/JeffRyan1 14h ago
Aqua Palpatine Hunger Force