The end of the 2023 actors’ strike seems to have opened the floodgates on promotions — the last 24 hours have been packed with trailers and teasers for upcoming series, including Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s TV reunion and the latest adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
A quirky spy drama, an urgent documentary short, and Netflix’s answer to The Summer I Turned Pretty round out our favorite trailers of the week.
Netflix’s Geeked Week is in full swing, offering sneak peeks and more info on the streamer’s biggest genre properties. The new Avatar: The Last Airbender is easily one of the most anticipated titles, even if Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop recently made viewers leery of live-action adaptations. But the trailer for the new series based on Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s animated show, which premiered in 2005 on Nickelodeon, has an equal sense of wonder and foreboding.
The Stand’s Gordon Cormier leads the series as young Aang, alongside Kiawentiio Tarbell (Anne With an E) as Katara, Ian Ousley as Sokka, and Pen15’s Dallas Liu as Zuko. Daniel Dae Kim makes his fiery debut in the trailer, but we can also look forward to seeing Utkarsh Ambudkar, Amber Midthunder, Danny Pudi, and TV mainstay George Takei.
This year’s bumper crop of cult documentaries yields another engrossing dive into high-control groups and the role that social media (and SEO, which isn’t just the enemy of digital media) plays in putting vulnerable people in touch with those who would exploit them.
"Liberation is not a zero-sum game” says Elisabeth Epps, State Representative for Colorado House District 6 and a prison abolitionist, in the trailer for this documentary directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Samantha Knowles (the heartbreaking Black and Missing). How We Get Free chronicles Epps’ work as the founder and executive director of the Colorado Freedom Fund, a community bail fund that fights against the criminalization of poverty.
Apple TV+ recently moved up the premiere date for the third season of its offbeat spy show, also adapted from a book series, centering on a misfit team of intelligence agents led by Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb. But if you’re still anxious to see what’s going on with the Slough House squad, this trailer’s got you covered.
Another day, another YA adaptation from Netflix on the horizon: This time, it’s series creator Melanie Halsall’s take on Ali Novak’s 214 novel My Life With the Walter Boys. Nikki Rodriguez stars as Jackie, a teen with a tragic backstory who stumbles upon not one but two romantic prospects — oh, and they're brothers. What is a city girl forced to seek refuge in the countryside to do?
Is Austin Butler still doing his Elvis voice for Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ new World War II series Masters of the Air? We can’t really tell over the swelling music, rousing speeches, and the roaring engines of the 100th Bomb Group in the first trailer. Spielberg and Hanks worked with fellow executive producer Gary Goetzman and scribe John Orloff to bring Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name to exciting life on the small screen. Ncuti Gatwa, Barry Keoghan, Callum Turner, Anthony Boyle, Nate Mann, Rafferty Law, Josiah Cross, and Branden Cook co-star.
TOPICS: Avatar: The Last Airbender (live action series), Apple TV+, Netflix, Love Has Won, Masters of the Air, Slow Horses, Austin Butler, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks