The Best Shows to Watch After Andor

The Star Wars franchise has always been about rising up against fascism. We’re supposed to root for the Rebel Alliance to destroy the Death Star in A New Hope and for the fall of the Empire in Return of the Jedi. The prequels show us how easily fascism can infiltrate a government and take over from the inside. And now Andor shows us the power of rising up and fighting for freedom on a more grounded level. 

Andor isn’t a happy story, nor is there going to be a happy ending for Cassian – his fate has already been written in Rogue One. But without the people in this series willing to fight for a sunrise they’ll never see, the events of A New Hope and the Rebels’ ultimate victory may have never come to pass. 

Andor reminds us how powerful we can be when we work together toward a common goal. There’s power in community and fighting for what you believe in. If this show lights a fire within you to make your world a better place, here are some other shows about rebellion and resistance that encourage us to leave this world better than we found it.

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale may be a fictional dystopia, but as a show that began and is now ending during Trump presidencies, it is also a terrifying look at what can happen if a Christofascist regime is allowed to fully take control of the United States. As bleak as this series can get at times, it’s also about how June (Elisabeth Moss) and other women in this world do what they can to support each other and resist their oppressors. It’s never a good thing to underestimate women, but underestimating an angry woman with nothing left to lose might as well be like digging your own grave.

The Owl House

The Owl House may technically be considered a children’s show, but I say you’re never too young to learn how to fight for the rights of others. On the surface, The Owl House looks like another fun take on the fantasy genre, with protagonist Luz, a human, finding her way to the mystical Demon Realm full of witches, wizards, monsters, and more. But as the series goes on, Luz discovers that she’s not the only human that’s made their way to this realm. It turns out that The Boiling Isles’ emperor is really a Witch Hunter who came through a portal centuries before. He has been playing the long game, slowly subjugating witches and controlling how they use their magic over time, all as a ploy to eventually gain even more power for himself and wipe out all other uses of magic entirely.

The Expanse

The Expanse is another grounded look at what a space rebellion can look like, and this one is set a lot closer to home. In this world, humanity has expanded its reach beyond Earth to Mars and the Asteroid Belt, colonizing much of the solar system and taking capitalism into the stars. With this increase in opportunity for enterprise also, of course, comes an increase in opportunity for oppression. Despite the wealth of resources in the Belt, the people who actually live there are among the poorest in the solar system. When a mysterious new substance is discovered, Belters race to be the ones to claim it so that Earth and Mars will finally take them seriously as their own sovereign power, setting off a chain of events that changes humanity forever.

Station Eleven

Station Eleven may not seem like an obvious choice for this list. It’s not so much a show about rebellion as it is about survival. But there’s still a lot to learn from this beautiful post-apocalyptic drama. In Station Eleven, a deadly virus has wiped out so much of the population that society as we know it has collapsed. And yet, there’s a group of people known as the Traveling Symphony who have taken it upon themselves to keep art and drama alive through their performances of Shakespeare plays. For 20 years they have crafted costumes, composed scores, and poured their hearts and souls into their performances just so they can bring these pieces of the old world back to life for the settlements around Lake Michigan. The Traveling Symphony is proof that art has the power to bring us together, even in the most tragic times. The Symphony’s motto is “survival is insufficient,” meaning that simply surviving in this world isn’t enough, we need the arts and community to truly thrive.

The Good Place

Throughout its four seasons, The Good Place has shown us how hard it is to be a good person in this world. Our afterlife may or may not have the points-based system depicted in the show, but that doesn’t mean that all of our choices and actions don’t still have unintended consequences. It may feel impossible to truly do good in this world when the odds are stacked against us, but The Good Place also reminds us that small acts of good can go a long way.

We may not see any outright rebellions in The Good Place, but what we do see is a group of people fed up with an unfair system doing what they can to change it from the inside. They all learn a lot about each other and the world they live in, and instead of just accepting their fate, they risk their own afterlife to try and make the process fair for everyone. Along the way, they learn that most people, if given the opportunity, will eventually want to help others and do good.

Arcane

Set in both the opulent city of Piltover and its run-down undercity of Zaun, Arcane shows what happens when both try to grow in power unchecked. Piltover has a long history of subjugating the people of Zaun, forcing them through mandatory checkpoints just to visit the city while at the same time dumping their waste on them and making the community ill. Zaun has tried their best to keep the peace, most resorting to violence only when necessary to survive, but escalating tensions between more radical parties on both sides nearly launches the two cities into war. Arcane is a heartbreaking story about two sisters trying to make the most of the cards they were dealt. They both end up on different sides of this fight, for a time, making it hard to choose which side to root for. Arcane is all about what can happen to people who spend generations oppressed by a wealthier party and the cycle of violence that often ensues.

Silo

While Silo is inherently much more grounded than Andor, quite literally, they both have a similar retro-futuristic style that makes it easy to get sucked into their worlds. Silo is set on Earth in the future after a cataclysmic event has made the surface uninhabitable and deadly. Humanity has been sent underground, living out generation after generation in a massive silo. However, the silo that we’re first introduced to has essentially outlawed artifacts from the outside world and punishes those who dig too deeply into the silo’s origins. The people of the silo believe that a rebellion from long ago destroyed the majority of the silo’s history up until that point, leaving them to rebuild as a society and forge their own path forward. However, as a conspiracy rooted in the mysterious IT department becomes uncovered, as does information about the silo’s past, more and more people start to wonder how much of their history is a lie meant to keep them complacent. Rebellion starts to brew once again with the silo’s future, and the future of humanity, hanging in the balance.