I’m not super duper mad or anything, I wasn’t gonna watch it either way (Legend of Korra was lib as fuck). I just think Avatar was a very tight solid story, and it’s fascinating how much some producers can look at solid character arcs and not understand them, why they’re there and how they work
“Why wouldn’t this traumatized 10 year old child rush across an unfamiliar world to immediately become a super-weapon in someone else’s war literally subjective hours after his entire people and culture were destroyed in a super-naturally empowered genocide?”
Also we’re removing element bending to make it more realistic. Aang is now a brilliant scientist who has qualms about dropping his wonder weapon on Japan.
It reads like they’re trying very hard to justify cutting all the “unimportant” episodes where we slowly have the characters better understand each other and the world was better fleshed out. All so that the new show can be 10 episodes a season.
Remaking things has never appealed to me, I don’t get it, I have the original good thing on my shelf, i will watch it as I want. Your new thing seems like yoy wanted money but didn’t want to risk making something new. Cowardly producers want more money but are so afraid of producing a thing that isn’t instantly popular.
Yeah it would honestly be better if they just said “we don’t have the budget to show all these adventures, so we’re gonna have to get creative”.
It wouldn’t be fine, because those adventures are the point of the show, but it would be better. Would at least show they understand it.
There’s always something admirable about a creative admitting what their limits are and how that has altered the production of their art. Rather than just trying pretend the limits don’t exist and spinning it as “actually I’m very clever to avoid these obvious flaws from the original”, so they can cover for their bosses not giving them the budget they need to actually bring the project in successfully.
Even worse: the show is 8 episodes per season. Impossible to tell a story in this time frame, streaming media’s constraints are making for awful content with bad pacing. The overall length of a Netflix Season is too long for a film, and too short for a full season show. The premium tv episode length often also makes for episodes that are either trying to pack in a movie run time of content into half the time or more commonly to pad a standard network length episode into twice the time.
I think the only way to use this to make good content is to make your Netflix Seasons just be part of a season like Season 1: Part 1 and Season 1: Part 2, or to shoot for telling your actual story arc over the course of many seasons, each one being a chunk of the main story circle with a tiny mini side adventure loop built in.
I think two good examples of how to use the Netflix production/distribution cycle in these ways are Inside Job and Lupin, both of which seem to be canceled earlier than expected.
The Netflix model cannot successfully produce narrative driven content, because its format is too long for a for a movie, too short for a show, while also being too expensive for a show budget and not budgeted enough for a movie. It leads you to either make a mediocre spectacle or to have to spread your content out over multiple seasons.
Netflix will always betray you at a number of seasons other than your target, and having gaps of time between episode drops means you have to always make each mini-season feel partially complete but also not entirely complete in case you get renewed.
I’m not super duper mad or anything, I wasn’t gonna watch it either way (Legend of Korra was lib as fuck). I just think Avatar was a very tight solid story, and it’s fascinating how much some producers can look at solid character arcs and not understand them, why they’re there and how they work
“Why wouldn’t this traumatized 10 year old child rush across an unfamiliar world to immediately become a super-weapon in someone else’s war literally subjective hours after his entire people and culture were destroyed in a super-naturally empowered genocide?”
We’re also making Aang 37 so we can explore more mature themes. We think the audience will really like that better.
Also we’re removing element bending to make it more realistic. Aang is now a brilliant scientist who has qualms about dropping his wonder weapon on Japan.
The only element he needs to master is uranium.
We’ve actually just decided to make the show The Office with Asian characters. That’s it.
Christopher Nolan is this you?
It reads like they’re trying very hard to justify cutting all the “unimportant” episodes where we slowly have the characters better understand each other and the world was better fleshed out. All so that the new show can be 10 episodes a season.
Remaking things has never appealed to me, I don’t get it, I have the original good thing on my shelf, i will watch it as I want. Your new thing seems like yoy wanted money but didn’t want to risk making something new. Cowardly producers want more money but are so afraid of producing a thing that isn’t instantly popular.
Yeah it would honestly be better if they just said “we don’t have the budget to show all these adventures, so we’re gonna have to get creative”.
It wouldn’t be fine, because those adventures are the point of the show, but it would be better. Would at least show they understand it.
There’s always something admirable about a creative admitting what their limits are and how that has altered the production of their art. Rather than just trying pretend the limits don’t exist and spinning it as “actually I’m very clever to avoid these obvious flaws from the original”, so they can cover for their bosses not giving them the budget they need to actually bring the project in successfully.
Even worse: the show is 8 episodes per season. Impossible to tell a story in this time frame, streaming media’s constraints are making for awful content with bad pacing. The overall length of a Netflix Season is too long for a film, and too short for a full season show. The premium tv episode length often also makes for episodes that are either trying to pack in a movie run time of content into half the time or more commonly to pad a standard network length episode into twice the time.
I think the only way to use this to make good content is to make your Netflix Seasons just be part of a season like Season 1: Part 1 and Season 1: Part 2, or to shoot for telling your actual story arc over the course of many seasons, each one being a chunk of the main story circle with a tiny mini side adventure loop built in.
I think two good examples of how to use the Netflix production/distribution cycle in these ways are Inside Job and Lupin, both of which seem to be canceled earlier than expected.
The Netflix model cannot successfully produce narrative driven content, because its format is too long for a for a movie, too short for a show, while also being too expensive for a show budget and not budgeted enough for a movie. It leads you to either make a mediocre spectacle or to have to spread your content out over multiple seasons.
Netflix will always betray you at a number of seasons other than your target, and having gaps of time between episode drops means you have to always make each mini-season feel partially complete but also not entirely complete in case you get renewed.