Abandoned STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD TV Show Would Have Made Us Feel Sympathy For Palpatine

The description of classic Star Wars villain Emperor Palpatine on the character's Wikipedia page ends like this:

Since the initial theatrical run of Return of the Jedi, Palpatine has become a widely recognized popular culture symbol of evil, sinister deception, tyranny, and the subversion of democracy.

With a description like that, did you ever think there may have been a way for the creatives at Lucasfilm to make us feel any sympathy for that character? I certainly didn't. But in a new interview with VentureBeat (via io9), Cory Barlog — the director of the new God of War and a former LucasArts employee — talks about getting his hands on some of the scripts for Star Wars: Underworld (the live-action Star Wars TV series that was abandoned before it ever went into production), and it turns out "sympathy for Palpatine" was going to be one of the major surprises of the series. When asked about approaching God of War's angry protagonist Kratos in a new way in the new game, Barlog brought it back to his time working on Star Wars and gave us some details in the process:

...A character can go from one extreme to another. They can go from a character you loathe to a character you love and root for.

Probably the really small beginnings of this idea, the germination of this — when I was working at Lucas, I was allowed to go up to the ranch and read the scripts for the [canceled live-action Star Wars] TV show. It was the most mind-blowing thing I’d ever experienced. I cared about the Emperor. They made the Emperor a sympathetic figure who was wronged by this fucking heartless woman. She’s this hardcore gangster, and she just totally destroyed him as a person. I almost cried while reading this. This is the Emperor, the lightning out of the fingers Emperor. That’s something magical. The writers who worked on that, guys from The Shield and 24, these were excellent writers.

As if we needed another reason to be heartbroken that this show never came to life! Lucasfilm has said they're interested in mining those unproduced scripts for ideas for future projects, but they've cautioned that we won't see a live-action TV show any time soon. For more about the earlier incarnation of what the show would have been, click here.