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TV has not been the same since the COVID-19 pandemic, to say nothing of the way the global pandemic drastically changed our lives, politics, and worldview. For many TV shows in production ahead of the pandemic's breakout in March of 2020, adapting to new challenges became the name of the game. And for a show in pre-production like Disney+'s Andor, creators had to change plans they hadn't even gotten to implement yet. Although according to Andor's creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, those changes were for the better.

Gilroy, who led the Star Wars series and co-wrote the script for Cassian Andor's first appearance in Rogue One: A Star Wars story, was speaking at the PaleyLive: An Evening With Andor panel at The Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles just after the second season of the hit live-action series had wrapped up. Toward the end of the discussion, Gilroy recounted his original plans for creating Andor, plans which he admits were overly complicated

"I came on the show in the beginning with absolute ignorance," says the showrunner, "Like, OK, we're going to do five years [of the series] and I'm going to direct the first three episodes. There was a panic about the thing and I had a lot of material. Luke [Hall, production designer] and I had worked for months and months and months. So I was in a panic, I didn't have time to read a lot of submissions or do anything and I'm actually terrified. [I figured] I'll get Danny, my brother, Bo Willimon, who worked for on House of Cards [...] and Steven Schiff [...] and like we'll do the [writer's] room for a couple days. We did it for a week and we figured out what we're going to do. Everybody went off and that idea; it was absolutely insane." 

However, not long after that idea was formulated, COVID broke out, and everything changed. 

"COVID saved our show," Gilroy says, "COVID drove me back to the States in the middle of the night and it stopped [production]. I was praying the show would go away, I was so terrified of the show at that point. But through COVID, in a bolthole, I started rewriting my scripts. Sanne [Wohlenberg, executive producer] said, 'Hey, we're going to come back in November. You're going to come back.' I said, 'I'm not going I'm not dying for the show. i'm not coming back, I'm not directing.' We'll get British directors."

The audience, and the Andor creatives on stage, break out in a laugh.

"I meant local directors," Gilroy helpfully clarified, "You couldn't you couldn't travel actually at that point. It's quarantine."

"The salient point of this," Gilroy concludes, "Is that because of COVID, and because I was remote, and because of Zoom, and because I just started this obsessive rewriting project, we learned how to make the show remotely. Our system then became absolutely blueprinted, perfect, multi-thousand-meetinged scripts. So that, by the time everything went to the floor, the idea of having a writer on set was anomalous to us. [We said] 'Let's get the best directors we can, and then everything should be perfect. The actors know how to deputize, to run their performances. Let them swing every day. We don't want coverage, we want super directors. We want intentional directing, and if somebody fucks up, we'll fix it,' but we ended up with a system that you would never come to normally. That probably no one here has ever worked on. It was all predicated on having blueprinted, super-prepped everything to take to the floor. No writer on the set. And that worked for us."

Andor: A Star Wars Story is streaming now on Disney+. 

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