Avatar: The Last Airbender: Every confirmed change to Netflix's remake

4. Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender will have amore serialized narrative

The first season of the original show had 20 episodes. Although Aang knew his job was to stop the Fire Nation, he's still a kid, and often takes Team Avatar on mini-vacations and detours. The live-action remake only has eight episodes to work with, although each is much longer than any of the Nickelodeon episodes. Still, the structure had to change a bit.

"Especially in the first season, becuase the first season of the animated show has a lot of standalone episodes," Kim said. "The second and third seasons became more serialized, but in the first season of the animated show, it's very much adventure of the week. So a big part of the process in the writers’ room was kind of pulling apart all of those storylines and seeing how the narrative threads lay, and then weaving them together into much more of a serialized drama."

I like this change a lot because it will implement a more modern-day approach to TV that you need in a big-budget, live-action show like this. It's nice to know that the creators recognized the need to look at all the episodes and decide where to rearrange the storylines to make for a more cohesive plot. Kim and company also rethought how the team reaches the end point of the season: their time among the people of the Northern Water Tribe.

"We needed to make sure that he had that drive from the start. And so, that's a change that we made. We essentially give him this vision of what's going to happen and he says, "I have to get to the Northern Water Tribe to stop this from happening." That gives him much more narrative compulsion going forward, as opposed to, 'Let's make a detour and go ride the elephant koi,' that type of thing."

I like the idea of Aang getting a vision and I think it will work well to establish the goals of the characters early on. We know that we will still get a good majority of the pit stops along the way, like the city of Omashu, the Northern Air Temple and the side adventure with Jet's freedom fighters, so I don't see a problem with ditching Aang's his daydreams about elephant koi. I think there is an opportunity to play with the idea of Team Avatar not wanting to see the Northern Water Tribe get decimated like the Southern Water Tribe did, and doing what they can to prevent it.