A long time ago in a media landscape far, far away, Star Wars TV did not have the greatest track record.
After all, the first small-screen entry in the movie-led franchise was 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special — a turkey so infamous, you won’t find it anywhere on Disney+ today. You can find the first Star Wars TV series, the 1980s animated shows Ewoks and Droids, but there’s a reason they’re not exactly front and center on the service. Lucasfilm’s 21st century animation offerings Clone Wars and Rebels were loved by the faithful, but often struggled to reach mainstream viewers.
Luckily, ever since The Mandalorian Season 1 helped to launch the Disney+ streaming service in November 2019, Star Wars TV has fared a lot better with both critics and ever-larger audiences alike. As of the release of Star Wars: Visions Season 2 on May 4, 2023, there are 12 seasons of Star Wars TV from the Disney+ era — as many seasons in four years as there were Star Wars movies from 1977 to 2019.
And there is, arguably, only one real dud in the bunch.
Six of those seasons are live action, six are animated. Ranking them all together would make for a very subjective list, since every viewer’s tolerance for animation varies. For that reason, we’ve divided our rankings into two lists — starting with the one closest to the space fantasy franchise’s cinematic heart.
Part I: Live-Action Star Wars
1. Andor Season 1 (2022)
Like many of its characters, Andor dared to break the rules. The backstory of Rogue One‘s Cassian Andor, plus a growing cast of other players who got sucked into the Rebellion, this show defied our expectations from episode 1. It preferred deep conversations between morally ambiguous characters to action sequences; it swapped cliffhangers for chapter endings. Still, showrunner Tony Gilroy ratcheted the tension expertly, and his prison arc is one of the most harrowing in TV history, not just in Star Wars. Here’s hoping the rest of Gilroy’s “24-chapter Dickensian novel” holds up when Season 2 arrives in 2024.
How to watch: Andor is now streaming on Disney+.
2. The Mandalorian Season 2 (2020)
Call it the Empire Strikes Back of the Mando trilogy, and not just because Boba Fett showed up in both. Season 2 built on its predecessor’s solid foundation of space western fun with something darker and more complex. By the end, a villain’s revelation had stunned our hero, Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin, along with a sudden separation from his found family. No wonder it felt so strangely right, so earned, when Luke Skywalker, the hero who went through all of that in Empire, came to claim Grogu from his successor. And if all that wasn’t enough, the season also introduced estranged Jedi Ahsoka Tano in live-action form, played by Rosario Dawson. If only that perfect Skywalker ending hadn’t been reversed so swiftly.
How to watch: The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+.
3. The Mandalorian Season 1 (2019)
The opening episode of Season 1 introduced the world to The Child, a closely-held Star Wars secret more stunning than any since “I am your father.” The second episode, which I called a “perfect little Star Wars poem” at the time, was better. That trend line of growing excitement kept going up for an episode or so more, and even while it sagged in the middle of the season, the final scene — Moff Gideon (Carlos Espocito) slicing through his TIE fighter with the suddenly-revealed Darksaber — made clear this show had more than one season of promise.
How to watch: The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+.
4. Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)
While the story never quite justified itself beyond “here’s a good excuse to get Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen back together again,” this off-world interlude in Obi-Wan’s Tatooine exile delivered surprises and emotional wallops in equal measure. Key to both was young Princess Leia (Vivian Lyra Blair). And what the multiple Obi-Wan and Darth Vader showdowns lacked in tension, given every Star Wars viewer know they escape unscathed, they made up for in delightful lightsaber-lit visuals.
How to watch: Obi-Wan Kenobi is now streaming on Disney+.
5. The Mandalorian Season 3 (2023)
Seasons 1 and 2 were great shots, kid; Season 3 is why you don’t get cocky. Showrunners Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau seemed to care more about setting up future stories than focusing on this one. They benched their hero for more than a few episodes; even when concentrating on his story, they systematically sucked the tension out of every storyline they’d built up (the Darksaber duel, Moff Gideon’s evil scheme, Grogu’s departure) with little to show for it at the way-too-pat ending. Plus they tried to get us to care about disputes between factions of mostly faceless Mandalorians, and it worked about as well as that time Star Trek Discovery wanted us to care about long scenes between rubber-masked Klingons.
How to watch: The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+.
6. The Book of Boba Fett (2022)
Somewhere buried in The Book of Boba Fett was a good story; several good stories, most likely. But that was before Lucasfilm made the dubious choice to graft a preexisting movie-length project about the famed bounty hunter of the title, which would have covered no more than an episode or two on its own, onto what essentially became The Mandalorian Season 2.5. Fett looked oddly weak, and not just because he was unable to keep control of his own show. Telling his story in flashback, a first for Star Wars, did not help. Nor did those bizarre bikers.
How to watch: The Book of Boba Fett is now streaming on Disney+.
Part II: Star Wars animation
1. Star Wars: Visions Season 2 (2023)
Believe the hype: Star Wars: Visions‘ second outing of artsy anthology stories, commissioned from a wider world of studios than its predecessor, is as extraordinary in the world of animation as Andor was for live action. The franchise has never looked this stylish, and it has never been this fearless about telling all kinds of stories. And if you thought Andor‘s prison episodes were bonkers, check out Visions Season 2, episode 8, “The Pit,” a story which dumps its prisoners at the bottom of a vast mining well and places a blissfully ignorant city above. Who says animation can’t convey the darkness in humanity every bit as much as film?
How to watch: Star Wars: Visions is now streaming on Disney+.
2. The Clone Wars Season 7 (2020)
A fitting send-off for an animated series that went from strength to strength, and helped to redeem the Star Wars prequels in the process. The Clone Wars Season 7, the only season of the show to be produced for Disney+, clearly benefited from being frozen in carbonite after the show was initially canceled when Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2013. Season 7 gave us Order 66 as we’ve never seen it before or since — over multiple episodes, from the perspective of clone troopers suddenly forced by unseen programming to wipe out their Jedi generals. The sense of doom was enhanced by Ahsoka’s attempts to understand and escape the massacre; the Order 66 scenes in Revenge of the Sith pale by comparison. Take that, live-action Star Wars!
How to watch: The Clone Wars is now streaming on Disney+.
3. Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi (2022)
With Clone Wars in the bag, showrunner Dave Filoni could start to tell some fascinating stories around its edges. Tales of the Jedi gave us an unexpected anthology of moments we didn’t know we wanted to see: Ahsoka’s birth; the backstory of Count Dooku, the treacherous Jedi-turned-Sith from Attack of the Clones; plus some noble heroics from Yaddle, the female of Yoda’s species seen only briefly in The Phantom Menace. The best compliment this show can be paid is this: none of it felt like fan service, even though it clearly was.
How to watch: Tales of the Jedi is now streaming on Disney+.
4. The Bad Batch Season 2 (2022)
The story of a rogue group of clones who resisted their Order 66 programming got better and darker in the middle of three planned seasons: the Empire Strikes Back effect was at work again. In The Bad Batch Season 2, we got to see a wider galaxy of clone troopers react realistically to their replacement by conscripted Stormtroopers, and the show apparently isn’t afraid to sacrifice one of its core characters — though we’ll have to wait for Season 3 before we know for sure.
How to watch: The Bad Batch is now streaming on Disney+.
5. Star Wars: Visions Season 1 (2021)
It may have been a more narrow series of visions than season 2 — specifically, tales made by a premium set of Japanese studios. But if anime is your thing, and if you’re happy with cheeky cute remixes of core Star Wars concepts, then Visions did not disappoint on its first outing. Nor did it outstay its welcome: Several of the disconnected stories ended on unusual notes that left us wanting more.
How to watch: Star Wars: Visions is now streaming on Disney+.
6. The Bad Batch Season 1 (2021)
It’s a mark of the quality of all these shows that the first Bad Batch season brings up the rear. There’s nothing particularly bad in this spin-off following a group of rogue clones who opened Clone Wars season 7; it just felt at times like a Clone Wars story arc stretched out a little too long. The mystery of Omega, the clone sister of Boba Fett — is she Force-sensitive — felt underdeveloped. But nothing was too off-the-rails that it couldn’t be rescued by a superior second season, which is a good sign for the future of Star Wars animation.
How to watch: The Bad Batch is now streaming on Disney+.
Need more Star Wars? Here’s all 12 Star Wars movies, ranked from worst to best.
