Avatar: The Last Airbender confirms it — we need the filler episode
Once, the most coveted form of media for an adaptation was a live-action movie. Nowadays, it’s all about the live-action television adaptation — preferably an eight-episode Drama™ that takes the source material really seriously.
Netflix’s new Avatar: The Last Airbender is the latest adaptation to get this sort of treatment. Based on the very good animated series of the same name — which was notable for having 20-plus-episode seasons (albeit with 22-minute episodes) — the Netflix version distills all of that into eight hour-long episodes. It’s dramatic and serious, and of course that means stripping the show down to its most plot-forward elements in order to get to the most epic moments.
As a whole, television seasons — especially on Netflix — are much shorter than they used to be. Eight hour-long episodes is the norm for dramas nowadays. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there are plenty of shows designed with that specific scope in mind that end up being great. But it’s not universally a good thing. What ends up getting cut are the more character-forward, less plot-relevant episodes. This is true for shows overall, which ask us increasingly to care about characters we barely get to know in a world we don’t know anything about. But it’s especially true for adaptations of more sprawling material, like a 22-episode fantasy-action cartoon or a whole series of speculative fiction books.
Most recently, we’ve seen this happen with Shadow and Bone andPercy Jackson and the Olympians, where the showrunners seem so keen on fast-tracking the story to get to the exciting part — only to fumble, because the tension of the dramatic moments just doesn’t have as much impact without the buildup. It’s the case of the disappearing filler episode, as television shows overall get shorter seasons, and it is adaptations of other source material that suffer the most.
Calling lighter, less plot-heavy episodes “filler” is a bit of a misnomer. The term was originally coined for anime
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