Like everybody else, I loved Star Wars:  A New Hope.  By The Last Jedi, I lost faith in the franchise.  After that, there had to be good buzz to bother watching.  The first two seasons of The Mandalorian and Andor were well done.

The Acolyte is interesting because it is getting extraordinarily bad reviews.  Following The Acolyte is more rewarding than watching.  Two topics I haven’t seen discussed.

The Park Place: Acolyte viewership

The fifth episode was viewed a cumulative 232 million minutes.  It cost $180 million to produce the 272 minute runtime of the series.  That is $662,000 per minute.  Disney+ customers pay $15 per month to access the channel for 43,200 minutes.  That makes 232 million minutes of viewing time worth $81k.

Disney+ customers don’t expect to watch 24/7.  To get the numbers to work out, customers would have to average less than 3 hours per day on Disney+.  That’s a rough calculation, but with marketing costs, the financials are undoubtedly worse. 

Disney is a huge company, but they are currently $11 billion in the red for Disney+.   They can’t keep pissing away money making content that people don’t like.

The other topic that hasn’t been mentioned is that Manny Jacinto who portrays “The Stranger”, who turns out to be a Sith, is Jianyu from The Good Place.

The Good Place is an upbeat fantasy comedy TV show with profound elements.  It takes place in the afterlife, with Kristen Bell portraying a garbage person and Ted Danson portraying a mystical entity who runs the good place.  They use “the good place” as a generic term for heaven.   I enjoyed it and it has an 8.2 rating on IMDB.  It ran for four seasons, and wrapped up well.

Manny Jacinto’s character is a clueless Florida Man who unironically considered his life on Earth to be awesome.  It’s tough to square his Jianyu character on The Good Place with his sneaky and sinister character in The Acolyte.  That suggests that he is a gifted actor, but I won’t be watching to verify that conjecture.

Here is a representative clip of Manny Jacinto’s Jianyu in The Good Place.

From episode 5 of The Acolyte, here is Manny’s character revealing himself to be a Sith.

 

I’ve seen several clips with Manny in The Acolyte, but only recognized him from the way he smiles and says “hello” just prior to throwing his cape.  That seemed like Juinyu.

When he says, “You really didn’t know it was me.”, it felt like they were alluding to the fact that it was the same actor as Juinyu.  That would be very clever, but this show has never been accused of being clever.