By George & Josh Bate
Recent years have seen live-action Star Wars shows about Obi-Wan Kenobi, Boba Fett, Ahsoka Tano, Cassian Andor, and more. But one key Star Wars character, despite being introduced over 40 years ago, is still shrouded in mystery. At one point, however, George Lucas planned to change that.
Before selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, George Lucas was reportedly working on an Emperor Palpatine series, which would have focused on the Sith Lord’s political life and translated elements from Adolf Hitler’s life to a galaxy far, far away.
During a panel at Spacecon San Antonio 2026 (courtesy of The Popverse), Emperor Palpatine himself Ian McDiarmid revealed details about the planned Palpatine show.
“[George Lucas] was talking about, I think I can tell you now, a television series. At the time we didn’t think about Star Wars in terms of television series. Very speculative. We had lunch one day, and he said I’ve got this idea, and I hope you might want to be involved. We could sort of follow the Emperor’s progress, like Hilter’s, some of that. There might be an assassination attempt, and of course it wouldn’t succeed. It sounded really exciting. And he also said that maybe you could direct one, and then I fainted. But sadly, that didn’t come to pass.”
This is quite the bombshell that McDiarmid dropped in San Antonio, to say the least. So many Star Wars stories tie back to Palpatine, either directly or indirectly, but there’s never been a canon story to fully flesh out a character who has masterminded so much destruction in a galaxy far, far away.
From what McDiarmid describes, it seems as if Lucas was a planning a political thriller series that, like Tony Gilroy’s Andor, borrowed elements from real-life history to tell a compelling, grounded story.
While the series ultimately did not come to fruition, we’re still holding out hope that a Palpatine series is made one day. Imagine a show set before The Phantom Menace chronicling Palpatine’s rise to power and initiation into the dark side of the Force under the mentorship of Darth Plagueis. And imagine if that show was narrated by Ian McDiarmid, while a younger actor played a younger version of Palpatine (Dexter: Original Sin style). Sign us up.