The Legend of Korra
Given that Avatar: The arrival of the latest Airbender on Netflix was such a smash hit, with the show remaining months in the various top 10 lists of the services, it was only a matter of time until they too the rights secured on The Legend of Korra, the sequel.
As of this week, The Legend of Korra has hit Netflix, and it’s already offering # 5 on the entire service, # 2 for TV, and I expect it to hang around the top ten for a while, because people realize that A) it’s great and B) there are 52 episodes to get through, which is many more hours to consume that each new movie in the top 10, than new seasons of other Netflix shows.
This moment feels a lot like redemption for the show, which debuted in 2012 on Nickelodeon, a house that both extended beyond its originally intended lifestyle, and later attempted to murder it prematurely. And yet, Korra ran out, and became enough of a classic in the eyes of fans to land here, as a top 10 Netflix show, eight years after its debut.
Korra
What went wrong with Korra back in the Nickelodeon days? Where to start.
1) Originally, Korra was intended as a one-time miniseries, but Nickelodeon lit the green for more seasons after the fact. The problem is that the series was not originally written to be a multi-part journey, as we saw with Avatar: The Last Airbender, all scripted from the beginning, so it resulted in some messy storylines and forgotten characters at the end of the series. series.
2) Towards the end of its life, budget cuts close dramatically by Korra, forcing production to do backflips to complete certain episodes in creative ways. In one instance, the show was given a choice between doing a cheap clip show, or leaving production staff. She opted for the clip show.
3) One of the most enduring legacies of The Legend of Korra is the (spoilers, spoilers, spoilers) definitive relationship between Asami and Korra, who were both previously at different times with Mako, and yet the final season and the finale of the finale seem to indicate that the two were now romantically attracted to each other. But this was 2014, and apparently writing one exaggerated relationship between two female characters was not possible for a children’s channel, and so the series ended with no more than a little handshake in its final moments, and it had to be confirmed later by the makers that yes, the two had formed a romantic bond (and a billion pieces of fan art were spawned in the process).
Korra
But Korra has stood the test of time and is now getting a very deserved moment in the sun here on Netflix, where it will be watched by probably 50x the audience that originally saw it on Nickelodeon. While the general consensus is that the series as a whole is not quite as good as The Last Airbender, this is such a high bar, and even everywhere close it still comes down to a great show.
Avatar drama rages to this day, as the co-creators of the universe just emerged from Netflix’s live-action adaptation of The Last Airbender, citing creative differences. We’ll see what happens next, but for now we’ve had these two classic series in their entirety on Netflix for a while, and that’s enough.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube en Instagram. Picking up my sci-fi novels Herokiller en Herokiller 2, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.
