#tl;dr albert kim needs to embrace plot compression techniques (mostly from comedy)

[arbitrarygreay]

ATLA live action

Based on the first two episodes. I'm approaching this show from a different angle than most of Tumblr. For starters, I don't actually care that much about the cartoon. It's fine, not great. Secondly, I have really liked the work of showrunner Albert Kim, from his start on Leverage to his growth on Nikita (not interested in Sleepy Hollow, haven't watched Pantheon yet). I was hoping for his track record to hold up. (Particularly, Nikita was a case of adaptation that diverged a lot from its source material, both the movie and the LFN show.) I don't know how switching to a direct adaptation of something set in a fantasy medieval time turned Albert's brain into fandom mush, but the script feels like the kind of fanfiction that are borderline meta posts, distilling the source materials' themes into fairly overt introspection. That's great when you're reading a fanfiction, but it's terrible as a live action script. Anything to do with exposition or character motivation is speeched in the most direct and graceless way possible by the characters, like it's the first draft full of [summary of scene purpose and themes] placeholders, but they never got around to replacing them with more subtle content. All tell, no show. Because episode 1 is basically all exposition and introductions, it's over 50% this crap. Thankfully, episode 2 is a lot better! Whenever the show can manage to get out of its own way and diverge from the source material, it has a lot of charm. In fact, all of the things Tumblr was kvetching about before the show premiered (complaining that the Sokka divergences the writers talked about were signs of not understanding the material) were PERFECTLY FINE. I liked them. Those changes are like the closest the show comes to One Piece live action (with its Garp/Koby/Helmeppo original content, as well as cutting all of the shounen style boss rushes). I think one of Albert Kim's weaknesses is that his background is mostly in more serialized stuff. There's a sense that he had the characters keep saying their motivations directly because there wasn't time in the miniscule episode count to do entire episodes about them. However, what he could have done instead were short montages to show (instead of tell) patterns of behavior over time, instead of fully fleshed out sequences. Of the previous shows he worked on, only Leverage sometimes used this technique, so I can see why he didn't think of them. I'm thinking of them because I've been watching Xena, and the compatibility of ATLA with shows like Xena or Legend of the Seeker are obvious. My current description of ATLA live action is precisely "B-minus tier Xena episode". The ideas are there (showing the writers' understanding of the material they have), and execution even has its moments, but they're underexplored. For example, S05E02 "Chakram".