Freedom And/or Speech

A few months ago, Ross Douthat, a columnist and podcaster at the New York Times, interviewed Tony Gilroy, the creator of Andor, the outstanding Disney+ series—set in the Star Wars universe and portraying, in tense, often granular detail, the tightening chokehold of the fascistic Galactic Empire and coalescence of the rebellion against it—that had just wrapped its second and final season. Many of the show’s themes had clear contemporary resonance—The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka observed that a chilling plotline involving an Imperial massacre evoked (albeit imprecisely) the war in Gaza, going “further in its denunciation of violent occupation than most news coverage dares to”—and the premise of Douthat’s conversation with Gilroy was that the latter had made an explicitly left-wing work of art that the former, a conservative, thought didn’t suck. Gilroy pushed back on the “left wing” part of this premise, asking Douthat, incredulously, “Do you identify with the Empire?” “No, I don’t,” Douthat responded. “But I don’t think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism.”

Last week, ABC, the broadcast network that Disney owns, indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after he made (deeply unhelpful, if not technically inaccurate) remarks about the politicization of the recent murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk; Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, leveled a thinly veiled threat of regulatory consequences (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”); and Nexstar and Sinclair, two local broadcast chains (the former of which has a merger pending before the FCC) that own ABC-affiliated stations, preempted Kimmel’s show. (For more on how this all went down, read this piece by my new colleague Amos Barshad.) Nexstar, for one, denied caving to government pressure, but the timeline warranted no benefit of the doubt, and liberal critics did not offer it. Unionized writers protested outside Disney’s HQ in California, waving placards with slogans that included “Did you even watch Andor?” and “This is literally what your show Andor is about.” Dan Gilroy—a writer on the show (and Tony’s brother), who recently won an Emmy for his work on an episode in which the liberal senator Mon Mothma chastises the aforementioned Imperial massacre as a “genocide” and its ultimate perpetrator, Emperor Palpatine, as a “monster”—wrote an op-ed for Deadline decrying the treatment of Kimmel as “jack-booted” and reminiscent of Putin’s Russia. “Many people saw parallels between Andor and the real world. I see them as well, particularly in the events of the last week,” Gilroy wrote. The entertainment industry, he added, “faces the most sophisticated, venomous, creeping evil in America’s history. There’s no standing above this conflict. No impartial observers. If you’re on the sidelines you’ve made a choice and must live with it.”