Ian McDiarmid Reveals George Lucas’s Scrapped Palpatine TV Show Would’ve Mirrored Hitler’s Rise to Power
Star Wars fans have spent decades piecing together the franchise’s many shelved ideas, from unused scripts to entire seasons that never made it past the pitch stage. Emperor Palpatine has always been one of the saga’s most compelling figures, the quiet architect behind nearly every major conflict in the galaxy, brought to life across the films by Ian McDiarmid.
Despite Disney’s steady stream of live action spinoffs exploring corners of the galaxy like Coruscant’s underworld and the early Rebellion, none have ever put Palpatine himself front and center as the lead. McDiarmid has popped up here and there, including a cameo as Palpatine in the ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ series, but a dedicated show built around the Emperor has remained the one major gap in the franchise’s small screen expansion.
That gap, it turns out, almost got filled decades ago. Before selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, George Lucas was reportedly toying with the idea of producing a live action television series centered on Emperor Palpatine’s political life, according to comments McDiarmid made during a panel at Spacecon 2026.
McDiarmid described the pitch in vivid detail, recalling that Lucas told him over lunch that the show would follow the Emperor’s progress, much like Hitler’s, complete with a failed assassination attempt, as first reported by Popverse. Lucas reportedly even floated the idea of McDiarmid directing an episode himself, a prospect the actor said nearly made him faint, though the project never moved forward.
It is not entirely clear whether this was its own standalone project or tied to ‘Star Wars: Underworld,’ the long rumored live action series Lucas had been developing for years before the Disney sale. That show would have followed smugglers, bounty hunters, and the criminal underbelly of the galaxy rather than the saga’s central Skywalker storyline, with its events reportedly set in the period between the prequel and original trilogies on the Imperial homeworld of Coruscant.
Dozens of scripts were said to have been written, with each episode carrying an estimated forty million dollar production budget, a scale that likely made any network deal nearly impossible.
Whether or not the Palpatine concept was folded into ‘Underworld,’ the timing lines up with everything else Lucas walked away from once Disney took control of the franchise. Andor’s two seasons leaned heavily into Imperial politics without ever putting the Emperor on screen, which fans have pointed to as the closest the modern era has come to the kind of political thriller Lucas once envisioned. Looking ahead, ‘Ahsoka’ season two has a confirmed early 2027 release window, while ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is currently playing in theaters.
It is hard not to wonder how a Palpatine origin show framed around a galactic dictator’s rise would have landed if Lucas had gotten the chance to make it before Disney came calling. Would you have tuned in to watch the Emperor’s ascent play out across an entire series, Hitler parallels and all?
