By If there’s one person who is the focus of a lot of online chatter these days, it’s “The Acolyte” showrunner Leslye Headland. Some Disney+ “Star Wars” series showrunners do get discussed online, from Jon Favreau who is widely liked to Tony Gilory for obvious reasons.
Others like Joby Harold and Robert Rodriguez have been able to stay relatively out of the spotlight as criticisms of their shows stayed firmly with the show’s content.
But with “The Acolyte,” the divisiveness over the series has led to the show being widely criticised for both major and minor creative decisions and the blame, fairly or unfairly, often landing at Headland’s feet.
Some of it can be explained away with the usual Internet trolling, but there’s a lot of legitimate criticism in there from larger issues of dialogue, tone and plotting, to smaller nitpicks over adjustments to the lore. There’s also those who feel that any legitimate criticism is being lumped together with the trolls and thus dismissed.
One unlikely source of criticism is an interview segment in which Headland was asked if the series was the “gayest” Star Wars to date. What was essentially a clip of three people having some laughs went viral and drew complaints. Talking to THR about that clip getting the unexpected attention that it did, she says:
“I was surprised by the question. Amandla and I just burst out laughing because that’s our knee-jerk reaction to being asked that, but to be honest, I don’t know what the term ‘gay’ means in that sense. I don’t believe that I’ve created queer, with a capital Q, content.
Honestly, I feel sad that people would think that if something were gay, that that would be bad. It makes me feel sad that a bunch of people on the internet would somehow dismantle what I consider to be the most important piece of art that I’ve ever made.”
The series has no outright queer story or character elements on screen, but somw queer themes are present. The third episode’s introduction of an all-female witch coven, led by Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Mother Koril (Margarita Levieva), has led to the group being dubbed ‘lesbian witches’.
That’s an assessment Headland doesn’t agree with, even as she makes it clear she doesn’t want to diminish it for those who do feel represented when they watch those scenes:
“They’re in a matriarchal society. As a gay woman, I knew it would read that their sexuality is queer, but there also aren’t any men in their community.
So a closeness between the two of them would be natural. It seemed plot-driven. I would say it’s really reductive to call them lesbians. I think it means you’re not really paying attention to this story.
I’m proud of being a gay woman who’s accomplished this feat, and certainly, if my content is called queer, I don’t want to disown whatever queerness is in the show. I would be proud to create something that inspired queer people.”
Early viewership numbers suggest the show is doing fine. The series pulled in 380.5 million minutes viewed domestically for the week of June 7th-13th according to Variety. It seems plenty were still tuning in several days after the double-episode premiere on June 4th.
The first four episodes are now streaming on the Disney+ service.
The post “The Acolyte” Showrunner Talks Backlash appeared first on Dark Horizons.
