I’m a TV critic who’s constantly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new television there is to consume; I can’t imagine how the average viewer must feel. Currently, 10 episodes of a new space opera, six episodes of a Civil War drama, a miniseries about chess, an adaptation of a beloved novel, and the fourth installment of an anthology series are all vying for my attention—and those are just the ones I’m interested in watching, not the ones that I’ve already written off as being not worth my time.

Yet time and again, I’ve been frustrated by television in 2020. Seasons are bloated and meandering; character arcs are picked up and then abandoned; episodes don’t seem to cohere around any single idea, let alone a good idea; and often, shows are more interested in playing out their premise for as long as possible than they are in telling a story that has a compelling arc and a stunning end. Too many current shows seem to have been greenlit based on someone’s slightly deranged moodboard, or a movie idea spun into a series pitch; not enough are dramatically paced, well-written, coalescing around strong characters and a powerful theme or two.

So it was a delight to spend some of the doldrums of August marathoning Avatar: The Last Airbender—a show so good, it puts prestige dramas, expensive streaming series, and wry comedies to shame. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it took the beloved Nickelodeon series’ arrival on Netflix to finally get me to watch its compact, elegant three seasons, which are purportedly intended for children but somehow also managed to make me cry like a baby. Anyway, I’m late to the party—Avatar premiered in 2005—but I’m not alone: After debuting on the platform in May, the series stayed in Netflix’s top 10 for 61 days, topping a previous record held by Ozark.

Whether it’s being discovered for the first time or blissfully rewatched, Avatar has a hold on its viewers. Its resurgence on Netflix has prompted a new wave of fan service across the internet: explainers, timelines, fan art, “what really happened in that ending,” and all the Zuko/Katara ‘shipping you could ask for. (Their couple portmanteau, for your information, is “Zutara.”) I personally got dragged into an Internet rabbit hole over which astrological sign each character might be.

For an animated half-hour that lasted just three seasons, this is a lot of meta-text—but if you’ve seen it, it’s not surprising. The series, from creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, introduces viewers to a fantasy world guided by fully non-European tradition, where certain powerful individuals can manipulate one of the four elements. The Avatar is a particularly powerful individual who has the ability to master all four elements; as their title implies, one is reincarnated every generation, holding all of those past lives inside them.

This is a lot of pure exposition, kind of on the level of a Game of Thrones-esque epic, but Avatar spools out backstory in easy installments; it takes all three seasons to fully reveal the scope of this world’s great drama. The main story is that Aang (Zach Tyler), a 12-year-old, is the Avatar—but he’s been trapped inside an iceberg for a hundred years, so he’s got a lot of catching up to do. The whole world is at war, and he’s supposed to be the person that can stop it. Aang can already do air stuff; over the show’s three seasons, he learns how to work with water, earth, and fire, traveling the world to do so, and gathering friends on his quest to restore peace.

What’s astounding is how well the series works, given all this unwieldy backstory, short episode lengths, and children’s TV restrictions. But DiMartino and Konietzko, with head writer Aaron Ehasz, manage to make Avatar a winning, humorous sitcom, a gripping character drama, and a pan-Asian fantasy epic, all at once. It’s not exactly gritty, but it’s not dumbed down for children, either. At its heart is Aang’s heartbreaking youth, his slight frame at odds with the scope of the task he is born to fulfill. An eager-to-please goofball, he learns that the Fire Nation’s prince Zuko (Dante Basco) is hell-bent on capturing him even as he discovers that being the Avatar means getting built-in adoration from girls. But when he tries to go home to the temples of the Air Nomads, where he was raised, Aang finds that not only are all of his friends old men—but in their zeal to exterminate the next Avatar, the Fire Nation hunted down and killed every airbender they could find. His home has become a barren wasteland, burned out by a nation intent on total domination.

The majority of the characters are teenagers, and they each are forced to grapple with the heavy mantles of what they have inherited. Zuko has a cruel father (Mark Hamill) and a sadistic sister (Grey Griffin); in his efforts to win their approval, he sacrifices his own sense of right and wrong. The Water Tribe siblings who discover Aang in the iceberg, Katara (Mae Whitman) and Sokka (Jack De Sena), have been practically orphaned by the war; their mother was killed in a Fire Nation raid, and their father has been away for years, battling the enemy. At the same time, Aang, Katara, and Sokka are on an enviable adventure: Flying around on a bison (yes, you read that right) with no supervision, making camp wherever they please, exploring a wild world populated with badger-turtles and hound-eels. Teenage angst is balanced both by the real gravity of loss and the levity of giggling kids at a sleepover. The action steadily becomes more character-driven in season two, which ends with a devastating finale reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back. By the third season, the characters’ fates are so intertwined that the series uses several multipart episodes to get enough narrative real estate to unpack them all.

It’s touching, too, that the show engages with a wide variety of people, from impetuous earthbender Toph (Michaela Jill Murphy), who is blind, to disgraced firebender Uncle Iroh (first Mako, then Greg Baldwin) and bored rich girl Mai (Cricket Leigh). The show delves into the characters’ differences, mining them for tension, and doles out applicable life lessons along the way. Sokka has to learn how to respect girls as fighters. Katara has to learn how to forgive. Aang has to learn how to let go. It’s basic storytelling, to give the characters recognizable goals every few episodes—but the thing is, it works really well.

Avatar is produced in the style of Japanese anime, which at times feels a little too simplistic for the characters’ arcs—but that style gives the characters’ faces wonderful mobility, and the show uses it to heighten the physical comedy. The landscapes it illustrates are often jaw-droppingly beautiful, and the action sequences, usually punctuated by the bending of one or more of the four elements, are fluid and legible.

Best of all, Avatar ends with a graceful, thoughtful flourish. Franchise writers of all stripes could stand to learn something from how neatly Avatar lines up the audience’s expectations, then satisfies them in a way that still manages to feel unexpected. It’s not so much that Aang is victorious, but rather, how he chooses to be victorious that makes the story what it is. I can’t deny that it’s a little bit rushed—you can see why fans have been clamoring for a fourth season, one that the creators just this week insisted is not in the works. But it’s so satisfying to see a show end well—intentionally and swiftly, without dragging its feet—that it makes the whole series soar, in hindsight.

It’s telling, I think, that live-action efforts to capitalize on the magic of Avatar have failed. The 2010 M. Night Shyamalan film, which has an abysmal 5% on Rotten Tomatoes, was repudiated by fans and critics alike. DiMartino and Kotnietzko were slated to be the showrunners and executive producers of a live-action version on Netflix, but earlier this month, they left the project, citing significant creative differences. It feels as if the spirit of the show can’t quite mesh with the demands of splashy blockbuster franchises or the streaming content economy; it’s too light on its feet, too spirited, to get trapped in our current narrative paradigms. Lest this makes you (and me) too sad, don’t worry: The world of Avatar lives on in The Legend of Korra, also now on Netflix, and in a few spin-off comic books and video games. And if there was ever a show built to be watched again and again, it’s this delightful gem of a series—bright and balanced and full of hope, just like Aang himself.

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