I have been cautiously enjoying The Acolyte–through six episodes, I think it’s really good, actually. But as a TV viewing experience, The Acolyte has gotten supremely irritating because each episode is so bizarrely short. All of them come in under 40 minutes if you subtract the “previously on” segments and lengthy end credits–and each of the last three came in at or under 30 minutes. This is fast becoming the biggest gripe about this series, because it feels like each episode ends jarringly just when we’re getting into it.
This isn’t a new problem for Star Wars, since the first season of The Mandalorian had a similar issue. But those were self-contained stories, with Mando and Baby Yoda going on a different adventure each week. As the live-action Star Wars TV universe grew from there, the episodes generally got longer. While there are short episodes of Andor, for instance, that show feels like it constructed its episodes with whatever length made the most sense. That’s also generally been the case for Season 3 of The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ashoka–they had some long ones, and they had some short ones, and episode length stopped being much of a topic for a while.
Warning: There will be various spoilers for The Acolyte, through Episode 6, throughout this article.
