This show looks better than most Marvel movies.
Grieg Fraser shot the thing. Trying to say it looks cheap doesn’t even make any sense to me.
This reminds me of a quote attributed to Slawomir Idziak (he worked with Kieslowski, Ridley Scott etc):
‘Our country was for so many years in seclusion, so somehow we had to use a different system… it was first of all grounded in the film schools, in which we had only two departments: the director department and the cinematographer department, so these two people were at the head of the productions. In Poland the cinematographer is number two, and starts work on the project very early. The director is expecting a collaborator in terms of translating the story he has in mind to a kind of visual work. So it was something very unusual when I all of a sudden realized that here in the West it was the director who was telling the cinematographer ‘put the camera here’. I mean it’s two different professions and I really don’t believe, with some exceptions of course as usual, that it’s possible to have total control of the actors and the flow of the story and deciding about a single particular take and the lens and the visual part of it. In being a director you shouldn’t be too close because very quickly you are losing the sense of the wholeness, the most important element of the profession [and I am someone who has directed as well]. As cinematographer I should be one who observes what happens on the location from the seat of the average spectator. So I really believe in creative group work, and somehow our example in the Polish cinema, where we are really creative partners of the director, is a very good example. It works.’
http://www.cinematographers.nl/PaginasDoPh/idziak.htm
I wouldn’t say The Mandalorian looks cheap, though - not quite. It’s just really conservative, basic and fairly unimaginative. It seems to make a lot of sense considering this is Filoni’s live action directing debut.