Quoted from HoakyPoaky:I also read this today, which I found to be very encouraging. The first draft of the show by another writer (who was fired) took place only on Tatooine, and involved Obiwan defending young Luke from various local threats. Apparently Dave Filoni was the one who reviewed the scripts & told Chow to toss them in the trash & go bigger, with the addition of Vader & the Inquisitors. All good things in Star Wars for the last 15 years can be attributed to Filoni.
"According to Chow, the story went through "significant changes" after new writer Joby Harold's hiring. Harold wanted to explore what happened between McGregor's portrayal of Obi-Wan and that of Alec Guinness in the original trilogy, and noted that the series takes place when the Empire is "in the ascendancy" and the Jedi have been wiped out, with any remaining survivors being on the run and in hiding. He stated that Kenobi's past, particularly his relationship with Anakin, makes him a "man who's very much defined by that history, whether he wants to be or not". He added that a crucial part of Kenobi's journey will involve "reconciling that past and coming to understand it and coming to understand his place in it", and also the "places he has to go emotionally as well as physically, and some of those battles he has to fight", which ultimately have "to do with facing that past and understanding who he was, his part in his own history, in the history of others".
Kennedy and Chow cautioned the writers against making any overt connections to The Mandalorian and its spin-off series, with Chow stating that the strongest connections between Obi-Wan Kenobi and the rest of the Star Wars franchise were to the prequel films. Chow wanted to be faithful to George Lucas's original vision for the franchise, and worked to connect elements from the original trilogy and prequel trilogy. She worked to make the series a character-driven story, comparing this to films such as Logan (2017) and Joker (2019), saying that it was "where you take one character out of a big franchise and then you really have the time and you go a lot deeper with the character". She was also inspired by "gritty, poetic westerns" such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and The Proposition (2005), as well as the works of Akira Kurosawa. She felt that there was a "strong correlation" between the Jedi and the Ronin with their "ethical code that goes along with it, in a world that's vastly changed". A new planet introduced for the series is Daiyu, which Harold compared to Hong Kong with a "graffiti-ridden nightlife"; it serves as a contrast to the desert planet Tatooine, where much of the series takes place.
Long discussions were held before it was decided to include Darth Vader in the series, and Chow said this decision was "not made lightly... Anakin and Vader are a huge and very profound part of Kenobi's life. We ended up feeling that he made sense in telling this story." Chow had championed the idea of including Vader in the series when executives at Lucasfilm were unsure whether they should. Similar to Kenobi's character in the show, Chow stated that Vader's character "isn't quite as fully formed as A New Hope", and she added that Vader's appearance in the series re-contextualizes the character's scene with Kenobi in A New Hope. The series also features the live-action introduction of Vader's Inquisitors, who are tasked with hunting down the remaining Jedi, after appearing in other Star Wars media. The way that Vader appears in the series and the idea to introduce the Inquisitors were both suggested by Filoni. The original scripts featured different villains, including Darth Maul, but Chow decided not to use him as she felt it would be "a little bit much" to have both Maul and Vader due to the large impact that the latter has on the story. She also acknowledged that Filoni had already told the story of Kenobi and Maul in this time period in the animated series Star Wars Rebels."
This is exactly what I wanted to hear. An emotional character driven story to flesh out moments in his overall character arc. It's got me excited for Friday
This turns into a huge success, then spend the money on a big budget movie & tell the Owiban/Maul conclusion the right way.