Albert Kim, who replaced creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, is handing over the series to colleagues Christine Boylan and Jabbar Raisani.
Sources say Kim’s intention was to lay the foundation for season one of Avatar: The Last Airbender after stepping in for the beloved franchise’s creators. Given the long turnaround time in crafting the series — Netflix ordered it in 2018, the creators left in late 2020 and the show didn’t debut until February 2024 — sources say Kim was ready to move on to new opportunities.
Co-executive producer Christine Boylan and exec producer/director Jabbar Raisani — both of whom were hired by Kim — will take over as the drama’s third showrunners for the previously announced second and third seasons.
It could be salvageable but it’s not offering anything better than the original in my opinion, which makes it not really worth it. It’s really hard to improve on perfection when you’re adapting and not just making something based on the source material.
It’s fun to see animated shows in live action but often they change from the source material either in an unfulfilling way or because they kind of try to find a middle ground nobody really wants. They need it to be quickly appealing to new entrants into the series, while also being familiar to the old fans, but the quick appeal usually takes away from what made it a fan favorite in the first place which disenfranchises the existing fanbase while never really appealing to new people.
Netflix also sucks as a content creator and host because they spin up and axe things like a rotary sawblade, so even if something is genuinely salvageable (I liked Cowboy Bebop) chances are it never even gets a shot. I would rather somebody take the source material and try a different approach, and that’s why I was into Bebop is that they pitched it as “a remix” and not a direct adaptation. When you don’t give a shit about alienating the existing fans you can actually try cool weird shit instead of just retreading the same ground over and over again.
The way I look at it is not as an adaption of the og series. In my eyes it’s simply an alternative history re-telling, similar to Marvel’s “What if”. Which makes it way more intriguing than looking at it as the same story.
But are an alternative history re-telling to succeed you either have improve on the story on the way the story is told. And I think the new show fell short in both categories.
What I was hopeing for (and It was always just hope, I never seriously expected it) was a very close adaptation of the orginal cartoon, but expand on the aspects that had to be tuned down for a kids show.
For example in the original cartoon you never really get the feeling there is actually a brutal war going on until the end of Season 3 and even then everything is quite tame. Portraying the war in a more dark and mature light could have added more depths to the seriousness of the overall conflict.
I don’t know. I might have preferred to see different stories about Aang or maybe previous Avatars. I thought there’s so many other stories within the same universe that are great and I think that focusing on the Gaang would always feel like it’s going to come up short.
That’s my problem with Star Wars when everybody is related to the Skywalkers. There’s so much space to explore, both literally and figuratively across the galaxy but instead we often just get memberberries.
I would LOVE a show about Kiyoshi or Roku.