Wild. The most Hoth-like thing I've seen.
Offtopic: Andor series is the best Star Wars.
How I Met Your Mother was a very popular show.
But when I watched it, I was struck by the fact that in many, many places where an ordinary sitcom would have a joke, HIMYM instead had a continuity reference. Everything about the structure of the scene would suggest that the reference had been a comical beat, and the laugh track would play, but there was not even the faintest suggestion of... a joke.
If I want to hear about things that happened in the original movies, I can watch them. Does referring to them improve Andor somehow?
I believe this more intense effect, at least for me, stems from the connection to the unique 'pathos' of the original three films. That's my two cents.
My best guess for why they do this is that it fills time with fewer set-ups and sets, saving production costs. I can't figure out another angle for how this could be saving money per minute of "content".
The new season makes that really clear, because each 3-episode "movie" is 130ish minutes long and clearly could have been one 90ish minute film without losing anything important at all, still with plenty of time for relaxed-pace character development and such.
Modern TV is made to be consumed (I use that word intentionally, not watched) by people who aren't really paying attention to what's happening, so you need to restate any major plot point several times to make sure it sticks.
You've got 30 seconds you shot that, when the editor sits down to put it all together, definitely needs to be trimmed. But if you do that, it's 30 fewer seconds of "content". Your business measures output in terms of minutes of content, finished or watched. If you leave it in, the scene's worse, but how many viewers will stop watching because of it? Fewer than what it's worth to have that extra half-minute of "content". So it stays.
And operating this way, you can shoot 7 minutes of dialog that'd be trimmed to 4.5 minutes in a good edit (it's many individual shots, and most have at least a little on the beginning or end that need to go), instead trimming only what's absolutely necessary and get 5 or maybe 5.5 minutes out of it; do that over an entire 40 minute episode and you've saved yourself an entire longish scene that you'd have had to set up for otherwise, to fill the same time. Each set-up is expensive, so that's also saving you money despite being the same amount of "content".
It’s also a better star wars, in that it’s playing in the same space as the originals, and not a lot of things do that very well, so it’s nice to see anything doing it decently well. Andor’s competition is basically all of political action-thrillers, and that’s a crowded space in which it doesn’t really stand out.