Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This animated series got surprisingly little hype for being George Lucas's official follow-up to Episode III. I think everybody, assuming that no more movies would ever be made, wanted a live-action TV series. Not to mention there was a lot of angst over the prequels not matching expectations and people were eager to move on.
But in retrospect, animated was definitely the way to go. A live-action show would have to be on a small scale for budgetary reasons, and this show is anything but small scale. Sure, the animation and visuals are modest at first, but by the third season, Uncle George had cracked open the wallet, and things started looking amazing.
It's not just about the looks, though. The series, which takes place in the three-year span between Episode II (which kicked off the in-universe Clone War) and Episode III (which ended with the Emperor's ascension and the birth of Darth Vader), addresses a lot of the common complaints about the prequels––that Anakin wasn't at all likable, that we didn't get to see his much-talked-about friendship with Obi-Wan, that all the actual star wars seemed to happen offscreen between movies.
That said, the series does swing and miss occasionally, which is why I've created this list of all the guaranteed good stuff. It's worth your time, and it's on Netflix streaming, so it couldn't be easier to jump in.
Clone Wars is anthological in nature, meaning that we don't follow one set of characters through every episode. This is good in that out of nowhere you might get a crazy bounty hunter-focused episode, watch some jobber Jedi go on a doomed mission, or be treated to one of the series' classic genre-themed episodes. But you also might get stuck with a Padme diplomacy episode or Jar-Jar hijinks. (Guess which ones I left off the list?)
To complicate things further, the episodes were produced out of chronological order until the third season. That's why this list starts with the 16th episode of the second season and continues to jump around a bit between seasons––due to the anthological nature of the show, it's not totally necessary to watch episodes in chronological order, but it doesn't hurt, and the last few seasons do tend to add more of the serialized elements that you would expect from a quality modern TV show, often building on seemingly unconnected aspects of early episodes in interesting ways.
This list contains the bare essentials. As you can see, it's weighted heavily to the later seasons, where the show really got rolling. If you get hooked and are left wanting more, you could do worse than watching the whole series, or picking and choosing additional episodes based on their Netflix descriptions. If it sounds like you'd like it, you probably will.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. These are the Clone Wars episodes you should watch! Do it!
