Avatar: The Last Airbender, Percy Jackson creators talk adapting YA stories

Creating a TV show is hard enough, but adapting existing beloved stories to the screen is a whole other proposition, one that Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender showrunner Albert Kim and Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan are very acquainted with.

Both Percy Jackson and Avatar: The Last Airbender follow similar paths in that they're both incredibly popular fantasy properties beloved by younger generations. And recently, both of them saw big-budget live-action TV adaptations: Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix; Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+. Both series got mixed reviews, but response was positive enough for both to get renewed for more seasons.

“When you are adapting a children’s book, I do think that the bar is different,” Rick Riordan told Variety. Riordan, the author of the Percy Jackson books; he helped make the live-action series alongside Jonathan E. Steinberg. “Children, especially young readers, love to embrace the story and see themselves in it … [As a creator] it’s wonderful to see, and it’s a great problem to have. But they do expect a level of authenticity. They want to see the story brought to life, not changed.”

Changing core aspects of a show can tick off long-time fans. Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender certainly pushed boundaries a little further than expected, delivering a darker, more gritty story compared to the light-heartedness of the original. I mean, they show the horrific Fire Nation genocide in the very first scene, an event that was only mentioned in the animated version. For showrunner Albert Kim, adapting Avatar was all about finding the right balance. “Take the original and break it all down, and then decide which pieces were the most important, which were the ones that especially the young fans were going to remember and definitely want to see and put those into the new picture that you are creating,” he said.

""Now, that said… there are certain things that probably weren’t going to work in a live-action show. A lot of the humor, which tended to be more juvenile or more specific to the original animated medium, didn’t translate that well.”"

Some viewers took issue with the shift in tone, but Avatar performed incredibly well on Netflix, garnering 2.6 billion minutes of viewership in its first week. The streamer has already renewed Avatar right through to its natural conclusion, which is the highest honor of all for Netflix to bestow on a show. Meanwhile, Percy Jackson is returning for a second season, with filming set to take place later this year.

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