Avatar: The Last Airbender remake only has 8 episodes, but they're much longer

Very soon, Netflix will debut its live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender, based on the beloved animated show of the same name. Obviously, there will be changes in the jump from animation to live-action. We're here to talk specifically about episode count.

From the moment our hero Aang is freed from his icy prison to the big finale where he saves the Northern Water Tribe from the invading Fire Nation, the first season of the original animated Last Airbender series had 20 episodes that lasted around 22 minutes apiece. This was back in the days before streaming, where episodes had to be of a more or less uniform length throughout the run of a season. The remake will have only eight episodes, but they'll around an hour long apiece.

Doing the math, that actually means that the first season of remake could have more total minutes than the first season of the original show, since 22 x 20 = 440 and 60 x 8 = 480. True, it's possible that not every episode of the remake will last a full 60 minutes, but the run times of each season will likely work out to be roughly the same.

So technically, the first season of the remake has the room to fit in every single adventure that Aang and his friends take in the first season of the orignal show, including all the dalliances and side-quests. But showrunner Albert Kim has said that he and his team plan to cut out a lot of the in-between stuff.

"[T]he first season of the animated show [has a lot of] standalone episodes," Kim told IGN. "The second and third seasons become 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.

He also said that they devised a plot device that would make Aang more motivated to get to the Northern Water Tribe, whereas in the original show he's easily distracted along the way. "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."

Fans have debated whether this misunderstands the point of the original show, where Aang begins the story as a kid who doesn't want to accept his responsibility as the Avatar. Him getting distracted along the way is a deliberate character choice, and only throughout hardship does he learn the importance of responsiblity. Fans worry that removing this aspect of his character weakens the integrity of the new series.

I think it's a little early to make a final judgment; it might work better in context. The first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender drops on Netflix on February 22.

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