Avatar: The Last Airbender showrunner Albert Kim has explained why and how they’ve added time jumps into the series’ larger story to accommodate teen actors.
A huge problem with live-action productions that are led by (or heavily feature) children and teenagers is that of certain characters’ ages not quite lining up with the real time that has passed for the actors portraying them between seasons/movies. We saw it happen in Harry Potter. We saw it happen in The Walking Dead with Carl Grimes. And of course, Stranger Things has suffered its effects greatly. Those are just some examples. So, how is Netflix’s The Last Airbender tackling the issue of telling a story that originally happened over one calendar year with real teenagers?
Kim’s answer is simple: You can’t fight against time and these massive productions take a while to write, put together, shoot, and edit. There’s no way a one-year long story would be believable with the main cast growing before our eyes. “There was no way we could do that. So we had to design this first season, especially, to accommodate the possibility of some time elapsing between the first and the second season,” he explained to Entertainment Weekly.
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