Avatar: Seven Havens, the first new animated series in the Avatar universe since The Legend of Korra, has premiered on Paramount+ with its opening three episodes. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender, are back as showrunners, and their family fantasy adventure starts from a premise the franchise has never tried: this time, the world wants the Avatar dead.

In Seven Havens, a cataclysm has broken civilization and society blames Korra, the previous Avatar, for it. Survivors live behind the walls of seven fortified havens, and whoever inherits the Avatar’s power is treated as humanity’s destroyer rather than its protector. Pavi, a young Earthbender voiced by Saheli Khan, keeps her abilities hidden in the haven of Ellora. Then Karthik (Akshay Khanna) discovers her secret and reveals another child he believes is the Avatar: Nisha (Aishu Devan), Pavi’s long-lost twin.

The original creators get their own studio

DiMartino and Konietzko built the franchise twice before: The Last Airbender ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008, and The Legend of Korra followed for four seasons between 2012 and 2014. Seven Havens is the first series from Avatar Studios, the Nickelodeon division DiMartino and Konietzko launched in 2021 to grow the franchise. Nickelodeon ordered it in February 2025 as a 26-episode commitment split into two “books” of 13 half-hour episodes, the structure the original series used for Water, Earth and Fire.

The show is animated in 2D at Nickelodeon Animation Studio. Ethan Spaulding is executive producer, Sehaj Sethi is head writer and co-executive producer, and Alexandra Chiu is supervising director. Jeremy Zuckerman, who scored The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, returns as composer.

The return matters because of how the pair last left the franchise. In 2020 they walked away from Netflix’s live-action adaptation of The Last Airbender over creative differences. Seven Havens puts them back in charge of an Avatar story on screen for the first time since Korra ended in 2014.

A new cast, and one familiar voice

Saheli Khan leads as Pavi, with Aishu Devan as her twin, Nisha. Major Curda voices Jae, an airbender who leads a squad in the Brigade, Ellora’s defence force. Akshay Khanna plays Karthik and Sakina Jaffrey voices Agam, while Darren Barnet and Dianne Doan round out the principal cast.

The familiar voice belongs to Dee Bradley Baker, who gave Appa and Momo their sounds in the original series and here plays Geet, an animal companion. The names of the new world, from Pavi and Nisha to the haven of Ellora, draw on South Asia, in the way The Last Airbender built its nations on East Asian and Inuit cultures.

Critics praise the writing and question the animation

Reviews written from screeners of the first six episodes are strongly positive. Kotaku reported a 100 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes the day after launch. TV Guide’s Gavia Baker-Whitelaw called the series “a triumphant return for the original Avatar co-creators,” and TheWrap’s Michel Ghanem wrote that Seven Havens “is a marvel,” calling Zuckerman’s music “perhaps one of the best scores on television.”

The reservations land on the animation. TheWrap’s review set aside the “simplistic animation” to praise the writing and world-building, and Ghanem added that the tone skews younger than longtime fans may expect. Telltale TV headlined its verdict on the opening episodes “A Compelling Story Despite Mediocre Animation.” Not everyone agrees: critic Alex Zalben called the first three episodes “thrillingly emotional, beautifully animated, and stunningly scored.”

How Paramount+ is releasing Book 1

After the three-episode launch on Friday, October 9, Paramount+ releases the rest of Book 1 in weekly Friday batches: episodes four to six on October 16, seven to nine on October 23 and the final four on October 30, closing the 13-episode first season. The series is rated TV-Y7 in the United States.

Paramount has already committed beyond the original order. At New York Comic Con on premiere day, DiMartino and Konietzko announced that Paramount+ had renewed the show for Books 3 and 4, on top of the two books ordered in 2025. No date has been given for Book 2.

A franchise about hope, rebuilt around fear

The Last Airbender has had an unusually long second life, helped by the wave of new viewers who found the original series on Netflix in 2020. Seven Havens is the test of whether its architects can open a third animated era that stands on its own. Setting the story roughly 225 years after Korra, and making the Avatar a figure to be hunted, keeps nostalgia at arm’s length; Slant Magazine’s Ross McIndoe wrote that the show “never leans too heavily on what came before.”

The bet is that a world which fears its Avatar can still produce the optimism the franchise was built on. Ten episodes remain in Book 1 for Pavi and Nisha to show the havens what kind of Avatar they are getting.