I am generally open to him and his views. I get tired of hearing things that only confirm my own worldview. While I agree with him sometimes, he is just as often challenging to me.

That said, I’ve been finding his whole recent “kids these days are awful” schtick really tiresome. It feels like an old man shaking a fist at the sky. I have lots to complain about Gen Zs and Millennials but I feel like he is really out of his depth. Every generation thinks their kids are awful.

But when he is on point, he is really on point.

I think it might be partially prettiness but I think it is mostly practicality. If the makeup is that difficult, it will take hours every day to put on. It can be hell on the actors. I remember reading about Peter Ustinov who played Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” but refused to do it for “Death on the Nile” because he did not want to have to wear that makeup in Egypt.

You have to make sure complicated makeup always looks consistent. It would have been really hard to do that in a series over multiple years.

One other example I can think of is Katniss in The Hunger Games. If you read the novel, her body was REALLY broken. I think her entire body was covered in burn scars. It would have been very hard to do that in the film consistently (though I will note that in the novels, the scars are not on her face. I saw it as symbolic of the inner scars of the Games).

So I think it is partially aesthetic but mostly practical.

Anytime I mention something vaguely positive about religion. I’m a former religious studies scholar who studied comparative religions. I have two degrees in the subject. I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial: the main thing I usually write is that you cannot usually say that a religion is a monolith - they are pretty complex phenomenon with many variations within them. You can say that Salafis are the totality of Islam. You can’t say that evangelicals are the totality of Christianity. You can’t say 969 in Burma is the totality of Buddhism. You can’t say Hindutva is Hinduism. You can’t say that the Settlers on the West Bank are the totality of Judaism. Religions without any variation or complexity usually die after a generation or two. I don’t just have these arguments online, I am used to have them with students and with friends. But nuance has few safe harbors on the internet…

Funny you ask. Most of the time I dream in the first person but I recently had one where it was in the third person. It was strange - almost felt like watching a movie. I tried to analyze or read more deeply into the dream to think if I could connect myself to it but nope. Just a random mind-movie.

I liked the Apple TV show, too. The podcast was one of my absolute go-to’s every week, even if I was not that interested in the topic. He said something in one of them similar to the idea he had at the end of Monday’s TDS where he said that if you want to do change, it takes hard work on the local level. If you want to get out of the mind-fuck that is national politics in the US (and I’d argue in most places), you need to actually pay attention to what is happening in your own neighborhood and try to fix that.

Thanks so much for your very detailed comments. And I take many of your points. I think you are largely right - perhaps I need to go back and rewatch the show because it has been a while. And I think you are right that ATLA is uniquely well-balanced between its serialized elements and its larger narrative.

Also, I think we agree on a fundamental point I was trying to make:

Am I saying that the adaptation is automatically going to fail because it’s leaving some of these out? No, absolutely not. In fact I think for the way most TV is told these days they’re probably making the right decision. More highly-serialised longer episodes are kind of by definition going to necessitate certain more fundamental structural changes, and collapsing many of these arcs and themes into side plots within the same episode. So no, I’m not criticising the live action showrunners based on what we’ve seen so far.

The conventions or parameters of the live-action show (longer episodes on a streaming service) mean that structural changes will happen. The original show had to work within certain parameters and the new one will have to as well. I am excited to see how they tell the story in a new way with those conventions or parameters. We have a lot of movements and story beats for each character but can they get there in different way that ultimately leads us to the same place?

The perfection of the original show was in that they took their story and worked within the conventions. In other words, I think that if they were making the show now, they would do things differently. That can bee seen in how they approached The Legend of Korra. They found a way to work within the need for 20 episodes by making sure each episode did count towards something (the Great Divide being the exception).

Another thing that just popped into my mind as I was writing is that if you take the total number of minutes, the Live Action show will actually have more time to tell its story than the original show (Original ATLA - 20 episodes at 22 minutes each = 440 minutes versus Live ATLA - 10 episodes at 60 minutes = 600 minutes). But because the episodes will be only 10, you will need to remix things.

Thanks again for your comment!

We have to remember that the original creators of ATLA wanted originally to do 10-12 episodes per season but at the time, the standard length of an American television show was twenty episodes per season. I love ATLA but there is filler - especially in Season 1. It does usually contribute to the story but it is filler. Because of the season length, narrative beats that could happen with tighter writing are spread out over multiple episodes.

With nostalgia glasses, I think many don’t see just how wonky Season 1 is. I don’t think it really hits its stride until the Blue Spirit episode. And even then, it is still getting its narrative legs for most of Season 1. Seasons 2 and 3 handle their length much better IMO.

There is a way to do the narrative arcs of Season 1 in ten episodes. Narratives can be combine into the same episodes that were originally over multiple ones.

I don’t expect a one-to-one adaptation. That would be boring. As long as the core remains, I’m happy to let them remix. You don’t go to the theater expecting to see the same Hamlet year after year, do you?

SO EXCITED!

REALLY tried to like it. Watched the whole thing but then afterwards, I felt like I had watched nothing. The farther away I get from the show, the more I dislike it. All of the acting was great. And when they got away from the video game, the story was wonderful. But I felt like I was watching a video game - which I was in a way. And I felt like it was trying way to hard to be profound. It’s sad because I thought that “Chernobyl” was one of the best things I’ve ever watched on television.

Edit: Completely realize that this post was not about TLoU but just needed to get this off my chest. When everyone raves about it, I feel like I’ve been taking crazy pills. On the subject of the post, yes, streaming services are getting way too expensive and I think we’ll reach an inflection point soon where they will all start collapsing at once.