Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week my house powered through a couple of esteemed series, including Avatar: The Last Airbender and a good chunk of Donald Glover’s Atlanta. I was frankly surprised by just how much I loved Avatar, and will be sure to return to the series at some point – it feels like one of those rare “lightning in a bottle” productions, doubly so in light of its disappointing followup. We’ve got plenty of rambling thoughts to get through, so let’s not waste any more time as we dive into another Week in Review!

In spite of not really enjoying the first Evil Dead, this week my house plunged forward through both Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, and I’m frankly happy we did. Evil Dead 2 doesn’t really feel like a sequel – it’s more a direct rewrite of the original film, with a much better script, a better understanding of the tone it should be seeking, and a far more engaging performance by Bruce Campbell. While the first Evil Dead attempted to be a genuine horror film, and largely failed, Evil Dead 2 is instead a sort of combined horror-adventure-comedy, with Campbell at last assuming his classic Ash persona, and Raimi seeming far more confident in his camerawork. Evil Dead 2 is essentially the film version of an actual haunted house ride – lots of distinct spooky setpieces with little connective tissue, but a great sense of momentum and fun tying it all together.

Army of Darkness builds on the strengths of the second film, expanding the franchise into straight-out swashbuckling adventure territory. Ash’s adventures in the fifteenth century make it clear why Raimi was eventually chosen to direct Spiderman; the man just understands classic comic book action on a fundamental level, and Army of Darkness feels like an indulgent comic book story brought to life. The film’s perpetual irreverence and lengthy running time actually fatigued me a bit by the end, but frankly, Raimi’s camp style falls so outside my usual wheelhouse that it’s a credit to his talent how much I enjoyed this film. And if you do like campy action-adventure, Army of Darkness is a triumph of the form.

My house actually finished Avatar: The Last Airbender a few weeks ago, but to be honest, I’ve been having trouble putting my overall thoughts on the series into words. In short, it’s good – in fact, it’s goddamn phenomenal. If Avatar were an anime, it’d slot comfortably into my Top 30 list, probably falling somewhere in the high teens; as is, it’s simply one of the best cartoons I’ve ever watched. Character journeys that build naturally across three full seasons of exciting adventures, vignettes that exemplify the greatest strengths of episodic storytelling, a world that feels rich and full of life from start to finish, and an overarching narrative that fits perfectly into its airing structure, offering a sense of solidity and catharsis with each new climax and season’s end.

The second half of Avatar was actually even more fun than the first, with Toph turning out to be an incredible addition to the overall team dynamic, and Zuko’s journey standing among the most well-earned character transformations I’ve seen. I was somewhat disappointed by how Aang and Katara’s relationship sort of fell by the wayside in the show’s later acts, and Katara in general was somewhat diminished as a character by the show’s focus on an expanding cast, but on the whole, Avatar was an exciting, charming, and thoughtful narrative from start to finish, one of those stories that feels so satisfying and correct in its overall construction that it’s a surprise it was carved by human hands. If you haven’t seen Avatar, I emphatically urge you to give it a try.

After finishing The Last Airbender, my house powered ahead into Legend of Korra, in spite of knowing full well it had a far worse reputation than its predecessor. And having worked through two seasons of Korra, I can indeed confirm that Korra is far, far worse than The Last Airbender – in fact, it’s frankly a pretty bad show.

The structural solidity and thematic congruity that gave the first series such a firm sense of purpose is absent here; instead, Korra is constructed as a series of season-long action movies, each complete with their own self-contained conflicts and villains. And instead of exploring nuanced moral questions through the Avatar’s adventures, most conflicts here have a clear evil and not-evil side, with problems generally emerging from Korra herself making consistently terrible decisions. Instead of cheering for characters you love as they tackle difficult problems that help them grow at people, you’re instead groaning at idiots who never seem to learn from their experiences, and who are only beset by conflicts because they’re static and nearsighted.

With a profoundly weaker cast, no real sense of narrative structure or purpose, and no thematically compelling conflicts to tackle, Korra lacks basically all of the main strengths that made the first series so compelling. Even the fight scenes are far less interesting, as Korra’s steampunk setting results in it leaning heavily on CG mechanical objects for battle, with significantly less of the well-choreographed martial arts and bending mixture of the original series. My residual fondness for this world and its characters is keeping me more or less entertained through Korra, but the series has so far been a profoundly disappointing follow-up to The Last Airbender.

Among more recent productions, my house has also been working its way through Atlanta, Donald Glover’s terrific ongoing TV drama. Glover himself plays Earn, or Earnest, a young man who dropped out of Princeton for unknown reasons, and is now managing his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), who raps as Paper Boi. Atlanta is absolutely brimming with compelling elements, starting with its all-star core cast. Glover and Henry, along with costars Lakeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz, are each so fucking good it feels almost unfair; all of these four have both the flexibility of performance and capacity for expressing deep, nuanced pain you’d expect from a movie star, and yet all four of them are pouring every ounce of their talent into bringing this show’s struggling heroes to life.

Along with its terrific cast, excellent direction, and rich soundtrack, Atlanta is seeded with key influences that help it stand apart within the prestige drama field; a fondness for madcap comedy and structural playfulness that calls to mind something like Tim and Eric, along with a lurking darkness and surrealist edge that feels unmistakably Lynchian. Atlanta’s loose episodic structure allows it to dabble in a variety of forms, naturally illustrating the racial background radiation of life in America, but layering that commentary in a mixture of goofy episodic conceits and genuinely gutting personal moments. Donald Glover is a modern renaissance man standing at the top of every art form he touches, and it’s been wonderful seeing his interests come together in such a sharp, funny, and personal production.