BACK IN 2005, GEORGE LUCAS ANNOUNCED STAR WARS’ FIRST LIVE-ACTION TV SERIES. BUT DESPITE SEVEN YEARS OF WORK, STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD NEVER MATERIALISED. MATTHEW GRAHAM, ONE OF ITS WRITERS, TALKS ABOUT HIS TIME WORKING ON THE SERIES WE NEVER GOT TO SEE

WORDS: STEVE O’BRIEN

FOR MATTHEW GRAHAM, the phone call he’d dreamed of since he was a nine-year-old Star Wars fan arrived in the incongruous setting of a field outside Frome. It was from his agent. “Are you sitting down?” “No,” Graham replied. “I’m in a field.” “Just sit down in the grass then,” said the voice, “because I’m about to tell you that you’re being considered for Star Wars!”

“It’s that thing you dream of, isn’t it?” Graham enthuses now, recalling that careerquake call. “It’s the ultimate daydream!”

The Star Wars that Graham – then flying high on the success of Life On Mars, the genre-splicing series he’d co-created with Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah – was being invited onto was a super-hush-hush TV project that Lucas had announced, to ear-splitting applause, two years previously at Celebration III. Rick McCallum, Lucas’s loyal deputy at the time, would later confirm that the series was to be called Star Wars: Underworld and would be like “Empire on steroids”.

Where the Star Wars movies had told simple stories of clean-cut heroes fighting the good fight, Underworld would instead, it was intimated, echo the dark, morally ambiguous worlds of The Sopranos and The Wire. It would have been Star Wars’ first live-action TV series and, as it was planned, one of the most expensive shows – if not the most expensive show – ever seen on the small screen. For seven years, Lucas and McCallum teased and titillated us with nuggets of news: It would be set in the 19 years between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope; it was being budgeted at around $5 million an episode; it would in no way feature heritage characters; it would feature heritage characters; it was “Deadwood in space”... And so on. Then, on 30 October 2012, Disney bought Lucasfilm for an eyewatering $4.05 billion and amid the media noise of the sequel trilogy, Underworld was quietly forgotten about. When Star Wars’ first live-action TV show finally dropped in 2019, it wouldn’t be Underworld, though much of what we’ve seen in Jon Favreau’s bounty hunter show owes a debt to that lost series.

“I don’t think we were a million miles away from The Mandalorian,” Matthew Graham tells SFX. “It was pretty dark: we had rape, we had drug-taking and drug abuse, we had beheadings. It was definitely not your grandfather’s Star Wars – it wasn’t cert U.”