The show feels like a remix of the original cartoon story.
It works for me in a way like the Zelda games all begin to blur as the story is retold over and over again.
These days that deja vu-like telling is explained by a conceit like the multiverse, but I wonder if it hints at a Dreamtime sense that these things have always happened and will always happen.
It might be that dramatic arc that's laid out with Sozin's comet and other celestial movements that accompany the arrival of the Avatar.
The story always had a grandeur beyond the Nickelodeon format back when I first started watching the animated series with my firstborn son nearly two decades ago.
I've revisited the series with successive children and there's been a pleasure in rediscovering the characters who populate the universe of the elemental kingdoms.
My kids didn't take to the Netflix series but I thought the action sequences were a massive improvement on the animation.
They bristled with sacrilege in the mergings of half-hour stories into the new hour-long episodes.
Yet every reworking of the characters seemed to make sense within the grander scope of the live-action drama.
At first the casting of Katara felt wrong and then I realised it made more sense for her to be closer to Aang's age.
Likewise Uncle Iroh took a little getting used to but, in the subtle details like when he handled the game tile, I gained a new appreciation for the role of Pai Sho in the Order of the White Lotus.
I didn't think I'd like the Netflix version after being horrified by the film version, yet now I want to see a seriousness taken with the political subplot in the Earth Kingdom.
