Nickelodeon’s Misleading New Avatar: The Last Airbender Series

Last Friday, Nickelodeon announced a brand-new Avatar: The Last Airbender series! Then, uh, it kind of changed its mind.

Seriously, the official Avatar YouTube channel posted about a “new original series” coming this Earth Day, April 22—a highly appropriate date for a new TV show, given the importance of the natural world in Avatar and its sequel, The Legend of Korra. Plus, Nickelodeon had just announced last month that more Avatar projects were on the way. Fans, understandably, went wild with delight and anticipation.

Unfortunately, the show the post was talking about was just a bunch of Avatar fans talking together about the show rather than an actual new animated series, which is significantly less delightful. Faced with fans going berserk, the YouTube post was edited to clarify this was going to be a “new, fan-led original discussion series” with this trailer that proved, without a doubt, the Four Nations Forum was nothing to get excited about.

That’s not to say any bad about these fans, of course. It’s just that a show where fans answer banal polls about Avatar—best couple! most underrated episode!—is something fans could simply among do themselves, and have been doing online since the series first aired back in 2005.

Whether this was an innocent mistake—after all, this is, very technically, a “new original series”—or Nickelodeon was intentionally keeping the description of the show vague to drum up excitement over something extremely unexciting, it backfired gravely. As of this moment, 103 of the Last Airbender YouTube channel’s 1.1 million subscribers have watched the trailer, and two of those were me.

Four Nations Forum debuts on April 22. Maybe it’ll be fantastic! But there’s no way it could ever be as good as a real new Avatar series.

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