Like Showtime’s recent Dexter: New Blood or USC football’s freshly hired new defensive coordinator, Disney+‘s Percy Jackson and the Olympians comes with a deceptively simple mandate: Just be better than the thing that came immediately before.
Christopher Columbus’ 2010 feature Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief was so bad — and, more specifically, the film was such a misconceived adaptation of Rick Riordan’s Greek mythology-fueled novel series — that Disney+’s series need only “come closer” in order to succeed.
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Percy Jackson and the Olympians
And it does!
With Riordan co-creating along with Jonathan E. Steinberg, Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a generally faithful approach to the books. It carefully targets a younger demographic, honoring what’s likably relatable in the source material and delivering a dose of fantastical whimsy, all while making very few outrage-worthy changes.
Is that the same, mind you, as being a good show? Only occasionally. Through the first four episodes, Percy Jackson and the Olympians works because of its good-natured spirit of wonder, its blandly acceptable core cast and several seasoned veterans delighting in taking part in this often goofy world.
But when it comes to gripping older fans of the books or audiences coming to the series fresh? It’s here that the series struggles to find the epic scope that the subject matter demands. It’s visually flat and the special effects are uninspired, with no awe to be found.
Walker Scobell plays Percy Jackson, 12-year-old admitted “troubled kid.” Percy gets bad grades, has discipline problems and occasionally sees fantastical creatures that nobody else can spot. Things reach a nadir on a school field trip to The Met, where Percy seemingly throws a bully into a fountain with his mind and possibly kills a math teacher (Megan Mullally’s Ms. Dodds) with a magic sword after she becomes a winged creature of some sort.
Except that none of the students remember Ms. Dodds ever existing, and Percy’s best friend Grover (Aryan Simhadri) throws him under the bus by telling stern authority figure Mr. Brunner (Glynn Turman) that Percy physically pushed the bully into the fountain.
Facing discipline, Percy returns home to his salt-of-the-earth mom (Virginia Kull) and generally gross stepfather (Timm Sharp), before it’s time for mom to drop the big bombshell: The biological father that Percy never knew was actually a Greek god of mysterious (but predictable) identity. This happens somewhat frequently, since Greek gods are hella horny.
Anyway, these half-mortal children of the gods roam the Earth seeking heroic adventures, but at least initially they hang out at Camp Half-Blood, a mystical facility in a secret glen that has merch.
So Percy is a demigod in need of training. Grover is actually a satyr in need of redemption. And all of the stories and the monsters from the stories — the Minotaur, Medusa, the Chimera, etc — are real. Eventually there’s a quest involving the stealing of Zeus’ Master Bolt, but … don’t worry too much about that.
Unlike the movie, Percy Jackson and the Olympians has some breathing room for exposition and character-building. It’s a full episode before the series gets to Camp Half-Blood, which helps establish Percy and his wry, youthfully cracking voice. It’s all generally wholesome and lightly educational, though for all of the series’ slow unfurling of the story, the mythology is less explicitly recounted here, so have your D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths handy.
The gods are presented as half deadbeat parents and half #MeToo-worthy sexual predators (entirely reasonable interpretations, both). When Medusa makes a brief appearance, the series opts for a very sympathetic approach to the character’s backstory, not enough to make her heroic, but enough to make it explicitly clear that being groomed and then cursed by bickering gods doesn’t make you a villain.
It’s a smart and timely approach to the show’s backstory, but it’s one of many points where “grounding” is done at the expense of spectacle that viewers are likely to crave at least as much. Even a grounded Medusa is still a woman with snakes for hair who turns people into stone, and if you can’t depict those things in an interesting visual manner, you’re selling the audience short. Medusa’s snake hair isn’t the least bit interesting. Nor are the Furies menacing Percy and his friends. Nor is the Minotaur who attacks Percy, his mother and Grover as they approach Camp Half-Blood.
What’s worse is that early directors James Tobin and Anders Engström pretty clearly know that they’re stuck either with second-tier effects or without the money for effects at all. So Percy Jackson and the Olympians keeps shooting its magical creatures either at night, from a distance or through total evasions like, “Let’s make the thing that should be impressive and scary invisible!” or “Let’s show the impressive and scary thing the way enchanted mortals might see it, which is to say as banal and normal.”
This has been a running problem with Disney+’s non-Marvel, non-Star Wars shows. They’ve all looked and felt parsimonious and then Disney is like, “Wait, why did nobody want to watch the adaptation of Willow that we didn’t want to spend money on?” And, knowing literally nothing about the budget of Willow, I can tell you that Willow looked vastly more expensive than Percy Jackson.
The more grounded aspects of the show, though, are just fine. Scobell is definitely somebody’s idea of a floppy-haired proto-idol, and while he doesn’t do anything notable with Percy’s more dramatic beats, he has a couple of surprisingly effective comic line-readings, restoring the sense of humor that the films lost completely. Simhadri has an amusing nervous energy, though neither he nor the show is able to do anything interesting with the physicality of a character who has goat legs (Percy’s “Grover, why is there half a goat in your pants?” is an empirically funny line of dialogue). So far, the series is underserving Leah Sava Jeffries as Annabeth, daughter of Athena, though whether that’s better or worse than the movie drooling relentlessly over Alexandra Daddario’s Annabeth is open to discussion.
The grownups are generally excellent. In less than an episode, Kull gives Percy’s mother enough of a spine and enough caring, maternal heart to justify his devotion to her. Turman has instant authority, and if you can’t find joy in watching one of his generation’s finest actors getting to play a — very minor spoiler warning — centaur, we have different thresholds for joy (again, the centaur effects are dismal). Jason Mantzoukas is inspired casting as the generally debauched Dionysus, now stuck as a glorified camp counselor. So far, he’s the only one of the stunt-casted gods to make an appearance other than Hermes, played by a much-loved Tony winner who, in his 20 seconds of screen time, contributes little.
The four episodes I’ve seen move quickly — they run between 33 and 44 minutes apiece — and without urgency. There’s no chance that anybody who hasn’t read the book will understand the stakes of the whole Master Bolt thing, much less why a 12-year-old kid was sent out to get it after what looks to have been a day or two of demigod training. Despite lacking momentum and wonderment, Percy Jackson and the Olympians plays pleasantly as a kid-friendly introduction to a world already beloved by many a kid.
And since its real quest was being better than the movies, it’s a bit heroic already.
