This is a blog series about … well, series. I love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies, comics.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season One television series (2023 - 2024)
Starred: Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri
Produced by 20th Television, Co-Lab 21, Gotham Group, Moorish Dignity Productions, Quaker Moving Pictures, and Walt Disney Studios
Originally aired on Disney+
Count me in as one of the many viewers who are far more satisfied with this television adaptation of Book One of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series than with the previous movie attempts. (To be honest: I am also one of those folks who liked the movies fine for what they were, but faithful to the novels they were not.) Disney’s eight-episode season allowed for a much more faithful (but not slavishly so) adaptation. Is it perfect? No, of course not. No adaptation from one form of media to another ever is. But it’s a damn fine eight hours of television, in this viewer’s eyes. I’m not going to spend time talking about the changes. Rick Riordan himself has commented on most of them on his social media, and while I love the books it has been over a decade since I last read The Lightning Thief. I’ll stick to my thoughts on the show we got rather than lamenting (or lambasting) the things we didn’t.
First and foremost: kudos to the casting department, especially on the three leads. I may be one of the few people on Earth who still have not seen The Adam Project, so my only awareness of Walker Scobell was when clips from that movie started to show up on social media, but what I saw in those clips definitely fit my perception of Percy. Scobell’s excellent use of snark is not the only reason he’s a great Percy, of course. He really gets the character’s struggles to fit in, to control his anger at his absentee father, to manage his ADHD; he also embodies Percy’s loyalty to those he calls friends (and his pain when those friends betray, or seem to betray, him). Leah Sava Jeffries is pretty much his perfect match as Annabeth – she too can bring the snark, but the best moments were watching her struggle with being the smartest person in the room. Aryan Simhadri brings a loveable goofiness to Grover that never tips over into broad caricature (which it could easily have done); his sense of comic timing is spot on. (Bonus points for the casting director who found Azriel Dalman to play young Percy; I believed he and Walker were playing the same kid.)
The adults are also perfectly cast. Virginia Kull is heartbreaking as Sally Jackson while also being a bastion of parental support (however imperfect at times). The gods and monsters (Lin Manuel Miranda, Toby Stephens, Megan Mulally, Timothy Omundson, Glynn Turman, Jay Duplass, Jason Mantzoukas, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Suzanne Cryer) are all excellent in their turns, but full credit especially to Adam Copeland as Ares. I do wish the late, great Lance Reddick had had more screen time as Zeus. I am also glad that on screen and even in the credits and despite their overwhelming star power, all these wonderful adults were not allowed to overshadow the three leads. They were supporting characters or antagonists (or both) but never stole focus.
My one major complaint with the season is that it should have been one episode longer. The time Percy spends at Camp Half-Blood is given only one episode and I think the Percy/Luke dynamic suffers for it. When episode two aired, I commented that I wasn’t particularly impressed with Charlie Bushnell as Luke in comparison to the other kids (including Dior Goodjohn as Clarissa). Watching the final episode, I realized I felt that way because Bushnell just wasn’t given much to work with in the earlier episode. All of his good stuff came at the end, and half of that in flashback to stuff we should have seen earlier. It was a stylistic choice on the part of Riordan and the rest of the production team and in my opinion one of the few missteps.
My only other complaint, and it is minor, is that the nighttime and Underworld scenes were all so dark I sometime couldn’t see details that I would have liked to see and I’m sure were there (because in all the other stuff shot on the Volume stage, the FX work is stunning and immersive). Yes, I’m aware that maybe it’s my television and not the production at fault.
When I originally drafted this post, I ended with a simple “So, Disney: get on with greenlighting season two already!” And lo and behold, just a few days before this post will go live, Disney did exactly that. I hope production on season 2, adapted from The Sea of Monsters, starts up quickly and runs smoothly and that it appears on our screens sooner rather than later.
If you enjoyed this post, check out some of my previous fantasy/superhero television-related Series Saturday posts: