'Avatar: Seven Havens' Review: A Rocky Premiere for a Boldly Different Avatar

Avatar: Seven Havens premiered on Paramount+ on Friday, October 9, 2026, bringing the animated franchise back to television 12 years after The Legend of Korra ended. The first three of its 26 half-hour episodes are streaming now, and at New York Comic Con the same day, creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko said the series will run four seasons and that a separate show, Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos, is in the works.

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The story is set 225 years after Korra, in a world shattered by a cataclysm its inhabitants blame on the previous Avatar. Their history books hold Korra (Janet Varney) responsible, so the title marks the next Avatar as humanity's destroyer. She is Pavi (Saheli Khan), a young Earthbender hunted by human and spirit enemies, who sets out with a long-lost twin, Nisha (Aishu Devan), and a mentor, Jae (Major Curda), to learn where she came from and to keep the seven walled havens from collapsing. Paramount+'s official guide describes Pavi as an amputee and lists the rest of the ensemble: Karthik (Akshay Khanna), a master airbender; Agam (Sakina Jaffrey); Daemin (Darren Barnet); Zi (Dianne Doan); and two cat-monkeys, Geet and Ruhi, both voiced by Dee Bradley Baker.

It is an original 2D-animated series produced by Avatar Studios and Nickelodeon Animation, with animation from La Chouette Compagnie. Ethan Spaulding, who worked on the original Airbender and Korra, is an executive producer, and Sehaj Sethi is co-executive producer. The first book is called "Survival," a break from the elemental season names the earlier shows used.

The world is not the one Aang or Korra inherited. Portals between the human and spirit realms were opened during Korra's run, and the new show builds on that change. Civilization has regrouped into seven walled city-states, the havens of the title, while spirits and bandits press in from the surrounding desert, and rivalries inside the havens matter as much as the enemies outside them. The central question is what the Avatar means in a world that has decided she is a curse. Gizmodo calls the premise "the most radically risky the franchise has ever had," and it is why the show does not read as a nostalgia exercise.

The show also arrives after a mixed stretch for the franchise. Netflix's live-action remake and the animated feature Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender drew reactions that ranged from warm to qualified, and the film's theatrical release was limited after a large leak. Gizmodo framed Seven Havens as the franchise's arrival on streaming, where, it noted, shows rarely make it past a second season. That reading sets a low bar for the four-season order announced at the convention.

What the 26 episodes look like

Book 1 and Book 2 together run 26 episodes, 13 each. Animation Magazine reported that plan when Paramount+ set the premiere date at San Diego Comic-Con in July, and Deadline covered the official trailer in September. According to Paramount+, the rest of Book 1 arrives in weekly batches: episodes 4 through 6 on October 16, episodes 7 through 9 on October 23, and episodes 10 through 13 on October 30. No release date has been given for Book 2 or for the newly announced Books 3 and 4.

The reception: ambition up front, execution behind

The first two reviews to land, from Gizmodo and The Hollywood Reporter, agree on the broad shape of the thing: an ambitious, strange first chapter that has not yet found its footing. Gizmodo's Isaiah Colbert called the premiere "a little rocky, but it's got potential," and named the new art direction as the best thing in it. La Chouette Compagnie, he wrote, turns the world into a "desert-punk, sci-fi-feeling series," a move away from the Asian-inflected steampunk of the earlier shows, with character designs that read as distinctly South Asian and backgrounds "awash in lush pastel designs."

The same review logged the problems. Some animation "feels a bit stuttered," the voice acting and animation "feel out of sync at times," and the show switches between 3D and 2D character models in noticeable places. Colbert also faulted the tone: despite a post-apocalyptic setting, the characters "never truly feel in danger," because the show undercuts its own tension with jokes. The dialogue, he wrote, "feels like it follows an edict for half-attentive viewers, with characters flatly stating everything about them." His summary is blunt.

"It's best described as impeccable art direction and middle-of-the-road animation."

The Hollywood Reporter's Angie Han was warmer. Her review is headlined "Paramount+'s Promising Addition to a Beloved Fantasy Franchise," and it ends on the line "Feels good to be back." Han writes that the show, like its heroine, "rises to the challenge with winning if imperfect grace," and she praises the world-building, the kinetic action and the bond between Pavi and Nisha. She was sent the first six episodes of the 13-episode season, and she notes that the story is slow to start, taking "longer than you might expect" for the sisters to begin questioning why they cannot remember their childhoods.

Han's review fills in more of the setup than the premiere states outright. Pavi is a 10-year-old street kid in the haven of Ellora with no memory of anything before the past three years, living in a cave and eating scraps or meals discarded by kindly restaurant owners. Her only companion is a giant cat-monkey named Geet, one of the two cat-monkeys Dee Bradley Baker voices. When her Avatar powers surface, she is set on a course that could save Ellora's future and unlock her own past, with Nisha at her side. Han also notes the score by Jeremy Zuckerman, which she calls intriguingly otherworldly, and a few reveals that hinge on clues obvious enough to remind viewers that the franchise is, at bottom, made for children.

The clearest point of agreement between the reviews is the relationship at the center. Colbert calls the twins' dynamic "easily the heart of the show," describing Pavi as carrying Aang's pacifism and whimsy while Nisha has Korra's militancy and combat skill. He compares the pairing to a what-if version of the earlier Avatars as siblings. Han makes a similar case from another angle, calling Nisha a foil to her peaceful sister and the bond between them the thing that makes the pair easy to root for. Both reviews note that the supporting ensemble takes time to warm up.

The two reviews do not really disagree. Both see a show pushed away from the franchise's comfort zone, with a harsher world, a hunted protagonist, and an art style built on deserts instead of temple courtyards. Both also locate the same failing in the first three episodes: the stakes and the storytelling have not caught up to the premise. They part over how much weight to give that. Gizmodo treats the inconsistent animation as a flaw in the finished product, while The Hollywood Reporter treats the slow start as setup for payoffs it expects later. Judged on the premiere alone, the Gizmodo reading is the more persuasive one. The show's ideas arrive faster than its craft does. The consolation is that Colbert reported the next three episodes improve enough to narrow the gap.

Four seasons, and a second series

At the show's panel at New York Comic Con on October 9, Gizmodo reported, Konietzko and DiMartino appeared with Sethi and the voice actors Saheli Khan, Aishu Devan, Major Curda and Janet Varney. They showed concept art and named the artist Moebius and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind as visual influences. Konietzko then said Seven Havens would continue through Books 3 and 4, extending a run that the public had known as two seasons and 26 episodes.

The panel also announced Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos, an action-comedy about the waterbending Avatar Kuruk, whom Gizmodo calls "one of the more tragic heroes in the Avatar Cycle." In the earlier lore, Kuruk lost his wife in a tragedy caused by Koh the Face Stealer. Bryan Konietzko is the showrunner, and Avatar Studios and Nickelodeon Animation Studios produce it. No release date was given. A third announcement covered comics: a Legend of Korra trilogy titled The Long Game, written by DiMartino and illustrated by Alexandria Monik, featuring Korra, Bolin, Zaheer and Tokuga.

The four-season renewal is unusual for a new animated series on a streamer. Gizmodo framed the surprise as a relief for fans precisely because animated shows often do not get renewed after two seasons. Whether the order was earned by the premiere's quality or secured by the franchise's value to Paramount is not something the announcement settles.

Caveats

Three qualifications belong with this review. The praise for episodes 4 through 6 comes from review copies, not from publicly aired episodes; at publication, viewers had the first three. The four-season plan and Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos are announcements, not scheduled releases, and neither carries a date. The reviews cited here are individual assessments from Gizmodo and The Hollywood Reporter, not an aggregate score, and the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic tallies were still too thin at launch to read as a consensus.

What to watch

• The October 16 batch. Episodes 4 through 6 are the stretch both reviews single out, and they are the first public test of whether the animation and the tone hold together across a longer run.
• Run time and episode count. Book 1 is 13 episodes. Book 2's 13 remain unscheduled, and the pace at which Paramount+ dates the later books will show how much of the four-season plan is settled.
• The critic and audience split. Viewers who came up on the original Airbender may weigh the new art direction differently from the reviewers, and that reaction will be visible within days of each batch.
• The Kuruk series. The next show's premise is announced but undated, and its creative team and release window are the next things to watch.

New episodes of Seven Havens arrive on Paramount+ on October 16.

Feature image: a still from Avatar: Seven Havens, courtesy of Avatar Studios / Nickelodeon / Paramount+.