“Percy Jackson and the Olympians” released the 42-minute finale of its first season on Disney+ last Tuesday. Armed with my laptop and a notebook, I sat down with an ambitious goal: watch the entire season from start to finish.
That night, I was seeing most of the episodes for my second, third or even fourth time, but I hoped that this viewing would help me gain clarity on a show that has received thoroughly mixed feedback from long-time fans and new viewers alike. However, more than five hours later, as I flipped through my notes, I found them largely unusable. I hadn’t written positively about the show, but I hadn’t written negatively about it either. What I had written was a six-page catalog keeping track of where the show had chosen to stick to its source material and where it had chosen to deviate.
I wasn’t a viewer looking for enjoyment; I was a judge weighing two scales: accuracy vs inaccuracy. It seemed I was on my way to some grand tally; I would add it all up and declare my ruling. Had the show stayed close enough to declare it a success, or had the beloved children’s series stumbled yet again on its quest for the perfect adaptation?
Since the release of the first “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” book in 2005, author Rick Riordan has taken what started as a bedtime story to his young son and grown it into an empire. The five-book series, which follows a young boy’s attempts to navigate a magical and dangerous world after learning that his absent father is actually a Greek God, has been followed by three direct spin-off series, two loosely connected series (exploring Egyptian and Norse mythology), several stand-alone books and a multitude of short stories all existing within the same fictional universe. According to Riordan’s website, “over 190 million copies of his books are in print worldwide.”
Only five years after the first book’s release, a movie adaptation of it, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” was released by 20th Century Studios. Directed by children’s book adaptation veteran Chris Columbus (“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”), the movie was a financial success, grossing over $226 million worldwide on a budget of $95 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
Despite its financial success, the film received heavy criticism from fans, and only one more movie was made, leaving the series incomplete. Riordan himself has been public about his dislike of the films, which aged Percy up from twelve to sixteen and restructured most of the plot. On X (formally known as Twitter), Riordan describes the films as “my life’s work going through a meat grinder,” in a now deleted post.
Despite this initial failure with the fanbase, another adaptation was quick to follow. “The Lighting Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical” debuted in 2016, and after several versions and two tours, the show arrived on Broadway in October 2019. The show is proudly low-tech, with Percy’s iconic water powers represented by toilet paper rolls attached to the ends of leaf blowers. With a one to two-hour runtime, depending on the version, the show cuts out much of the book, but what it keeps stays very similar.
With a heavy comedy lean, a rock music style, and an exemplary performance by Chis McCarrell as Percy, the show stole the hearts of many fans and has even been occasionally endorsed by Riordan, who, despite his endorsements, never saw the show.
While the musical was a success, the fanbase was still unsatisfied, and when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox (who still held the film rights) in March of 2019, there were immediate requests from fans online for Disney to adapt the series. As of this writing, the hashtag “disneyadaptpercyjackson” has over 30,000 posts on Instagram. Fan’s efforts paid off, and in 2020, Disney+ announced that the first book would be adapted into an original series. Riordan, credited on the show as a writer, creator and executive producer, heavily advertised the show on his social media and blog and stressed it as an adaptation that would “stick to the book” before its release.
In many ways, they stuck to this promise. This adaptation is notably the first to feature age-accurate actors to the book, include a few significant subplots, and stick to the book’s ‘road-trip’ plot structure. In many other ways, however, the show shifts away from the book and the adaptations that came before it. The show leans into its drama far more than its comedy, with the occasional joke breaking up a series of serious conversations and life-threatening situations.
The show’s characters, while age-accurate, are also deeply conflicted and complex. In the first episode, “I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher,” Percy confesses to his mother that he has been having what he believes are hallucinations and openly expresses his fear that something inside of him has “broken.” The show also frames the Gods as being the main obstacle that the kids come up against. Rather than paralleling their parents, the kids are a closer comparison to the monsters.
In episode three, “We Visit The Garden Gnome Emporium,” Medusa tries to convince Percy’s quest companion, Annabeth Chase, that her mother, Greek Goddess Athena (who turned Medusa into a monster), will cast her out after the slightest embarrassment. She compares herself to Annabeth, saying, “I wasn’t like you, sweetheart. I was you.” Annabeth rejects this idea, but the show largely reinforces it, with most of Medusa’s predictions coming true in the following episode.
Percy is viewed as the story’s hero not for his fighting prowess, which he largely lacks, but for having a personality and moral code that is completely opposite that of the Gods. Previous renditions have been about a boy trying to survive the next monster attack; the show is about a boy trying to survive his family with his good heart intact.
The show also made more minor changes, from character beats (usually timid Grover’s bold conversation with the God Ares is an interesting example) to costuming. In my attempt to separate the adaptations into their own works, I hesitate to mention them. I do so only to note that these small production changes seemed to fuel as much discourse online as the significant, thematic changes. I would have considered it all white noise, people looking for something to be unhappy about, but Riordan’s online defensive positions on such disparities seem to give them some legitimacy.
“There simply aren’t enough filming days to do everything,” Riordan wrote in one Instagram post over a change that I, in all of my cataloging, had not noticed. Beyond these niche complaints, people inside and outside the fanbase have aired genuine criticisms over the show’s odd pacing and occasionally awkward cinematography. If Riordan and the creative team behind the show plan to ride this out for the full five seasons, it might be wise of them to stop seeing the nitpicking as worthy of a response and start looking at what they can do to improve the show itself.
Now, I return to my scales (if I ever left them in the first place) and find that there is only one thing in them: tipping them so heavily in the positive direction that no mistake can be made. If someone asked me to form a hypothesis as to why the Percy Jackson books have become so beloved, I could give them fifty pages. I could talk about the pacing, world-building, humor and characters. But, if an adult came to me and asked me why they should give the books to their kids, my answer would be very short. Show it to your kids because Percy Jackson will teach them that despite their youth, they deserve to be treated with respect and kindness; it teaches kids that they can be better than the adults in their lives. Percy Jackson tells them that they exist outside of the grade they got in U.S. History; it tells them that they are capable of changing their situation.
That is what tips the scales for me: the message. The show is loyal to the message, and if a new generation of young kids can be empowered by it, I can undoubtedly handle how the characters pronounce “Thalia.”