Credit: LucasfilmStar Wars: Ahsoka has become one of the more divisive Lucasfilm properties in a long, long time, but despite that, the Rosario Dawson show is absolutely crushing its competitors in the streaming market.
Star Wars: Ahsoka had something of an uphill battle when it first launched on Disney+. For one thing, the casting of Rosario Dawson as the beloved Clone Wars character offended many partisan fans who felt that Ashley Eckstein, the original voice of Ahsoka Tano in the Dave Filoni-created animated series, should have been cast.
However, Disney and the powers that be introduced Rosario Dawson as live-action Ahsoka Tano in the second season of the wildly popular series The Mandalorian alongside a digitally de-aged Luke Skywalker (voiced by Mark Hamill and AI), the son of her former master Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen).
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Regardless of whether or not Disney and Lucasfilm should have pulled the same move as they did with Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) and cast the animated voice actor as the live version, Star Wars: Ahsoka has been criticized for the start for its slow pacing, Rosario Dawson’s portrayal of the title character, and the level of Clone Wars lore necessary to follow the plot.
It turns out that, regardless of how noisy some Star Wars fans are online, that does not mean those viewers don’t turn on Disney+ whenever a new episode of Ahsoka comes out.
According to the latest Nielsen ratings (for August 21 to 27), Star Wars: Ahsoka is the second most-watched original streaming program in the United States right now, with almost a billion minutes of the Disney+ program watched so far.
Among original streaming programs, it is currently only outmatched by the thriller series Who Is Erin Carter?, which has also had the advantage of Netflix’s typical policy of dropping all episodes at once and encouraging binge-viewing. On the other hand, Disney’s strategy of only releasing new episodes of Ahsoka on Tuesday also serves to make it appointment television, which seems to be helping.
Unlike previous Disney+ Star Wars series like Obi-Wan Kenobi, which featured universally known characters like Ewan McGregor’s depressed Jedi and Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen again), or The Mandalorian, which provided entirely new fan favorites without backstories to explain, Ahsoka has been accused of requiring viewers to have in-depth knowledge of the Dave Filoni animated series as a predicate to enjoying it.
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Star Wars: Ahsoka is probably a bit harder to follow without knowing the relationship between Ahsoka Tano and Anakin Skywalker, the backstory of Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi), or why everyone is so freaked out about Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen).
But, to be fair, every new Star Wars project demands that viewers know who Anakin Skywalker is, what Jedi are, and all that, so it’s a little unfair to blame Ahsoka for doing the same. It doesn’t seem to be hurting viewing numbers either way.
Have you been watching Ahsoka? Does it require too much lore for a casual viewer? Let us know your thoughts below!