Before live-action Star Wars shows became normal, George Lucas was already thinking about taking the galaxy to television.
Today, that sounds obvious. Lucasfilm has made The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, Skeleton Crew, Andor, and several other Disney+ projects. But before the Disney era, Star Wars on TV mostly meant animation. Fans had Droids, Ewoks, and later The Clone Wars, while live-action Star Wars remained tied to the movies.
That makes Ian McDiarmid’s story much more interesting.
During a Spacecon 2026 panel, McDiarmid said Lucas once spoke to him over lunch about a possible Star Wars television series. The idea would have followed Palpatine’s political rise, showing the Emperor’s progress in a way McDiarmid compared to the rise of a dictator. He also mentioned that the story may have included an assassination attempt against Palpatine, which obviously would have failed.
McDiarmid said the idea sounded exciting, and Lucas even suggested that he might direct an episode. But the project never happened.
The unclear part is whether this was connected to Star Wars: Underworld, the abandoned live-action series Lucas developed before selling Lucasfilm to Disney. That show was supposed to take place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, focusing more on the criminal world and lower levels of Coruscant. Reports at the time suggested Palpatine would not be a major on-screen presence.
McDiarmid’s comments leave two possibilities. Either Palpatine had a larger role in one version of Underworld than fans realized, or Lucas had a separate live-action TV idea centered more directly on the Emperor.
Either way, the concept is fascinating. A Star Wars political drama about Palpatine holding power, surviving threats, and tightening his control over the Empire could have been something very different from anything the franchise had done before.