Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest TV shows of the 21st century. It’s not just one of the best kids’ shows; it’s not just “good for a cartoon” — it ranks alongside The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and Chernobyl as one of the finest achievements in television history. Avatar used its fantastical, high-concept, mythical tale of a superpowered kid mastering the elements to take down the evil, oppressive Fire Nation to help little audiences understand big concepts.

Most TV shows need a season or two, or at least a few episodes, to find their feet. It’s rare that a TV show’s voice arrives fully formed, and its grand narrative hits the ground running. But that’s one of the most impressive things about Avatar: The Last Airbender: it was a masterpiece from the very first episode.

In just its fourth episode, Avatar tackled sexism and harmful gender stereotypes in a way that children could understand. “The Warriors of Kyoshi” was ATLA’s first “visiting a town” episode. Many subsequent episodes would follow the same formula, where our beloved trio arrives in a quaint little village, gets swept into a Seven Samurai-style call to adventure, and ends up saving the villagers, and “The Warriors of Kyoshi” remained one of the series’ best town-of-the-week episodes.

It was a bit tonally jarring to do a sea monster adventure right after Aang had found out about the genocide of his people, but the story of this episode made feminism accessible to young viewers. Sokka has very antiquated notions about gender roles, much to Katara’s chagrin, and keeps making sexist remarks. But when they arrive in a town with an all-female army, a badass warrior named Suki sets him straight. It explained the fallacies of sexism and misogyny in simple enough terms that kids took it onboard.

More than two decades later, Avatar: The Last Airbender remains one of television’s greatest social commentaries. It uses its heightened, fictional world to explore very real issues from our world. Much like The Wire, Avatar is a reflection of the society we live in. It goes to some really dark places, but that’s only because horrors like abuse and genocide and authoritarianism continue to plague the world around us. Where The Wire explored America’s broken institutions with an almost documentary-like sense of realism, Avatar uses fantastical metaphors and allegories to make these issues accessible to younger viewers.

Avatar: The Last Airbender isn’t just a fun cartoon about a kid with superpowers; it is that, but it also provides kids with a vital education in how the world works. The Fire Nation’s iron-fisted rule teaches them about the dangers of totalitarianism. The massacre of the Airbenders teaches them about the horrors of genocide. Throughout three perfectly crafted seasons, this show touched on war, imperialism, indoctrination, the class divide, and political corruption.

And since these are all issues that still permeate throughout our global society, and aren’t going away any time soon, the next generation of kids will have to wrap their heads around what a genocide is, and what a dictatorship is, and how wars get started, and Avatar: The Last Airbender has all the answers in a nice, digestible, anime-style format. Two decades later, this series is just as relevant, just as groundbreaking, and just as important. Even if you’re all grown up, and you understand the concepts of war and genocide and sexism, it’s still worth checking out this incredible series.

“The Warriors of Kyoshi” was one of the first Avatar: The Last Airbender episodes to deal with an issue-of-the-week, and it remains a shining example of what this show does best. It’s not preachy; it’s just curious and compassionate.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

9/10

Release Date

2005 – 2008-00-00

Network

Nickelodeon

Showrunner

Michael Dante DiMartino

Directors

Giancarlo Volpe, Ethan Spaulding, Lauren MacMullan, Dave Filoni, Joaquim Dos Santos, Anthony Lioi