Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 1 SPOILER Review
The first season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians has come to an end. Today I wanted to share my thoughts on the season as a whole. So here’s my SPOILER packed thoughts on season 1. Let’s go!
NOTE: As a point of reference, I’m not a die hard fan of Percy Jackson. I’ve read the first book (great book). I’ve seen the first film from 2010 a number of times, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. That’s my perspective of the tv show going into it.
The Good:
One of the things that made me like the first book was the world building. I just find this world to be fascinating and interesting. It’s presented as a normal world. But there’s Greek mythology and gods that live among the Earth. In New York City, The Empire State Building is presented as this world famous landmark, but it’s actually a secret entrance to get Olympus. Episode 4, we get this fight scene with a mythical creature at the arch in Chicago. Episode 6 takes our characters to Vegas. It’s fun to see this fantastical stuff happen in normal places. It’s just small details like that, that make it this world that’s interesting and fascinating. There’s similarities between this and Harry Potter. It’s about a young boy who discovers he’s the chosen one and gets swept up onto this adventure with his friends. The details and the worlds are different, you could describe this as a companion piece to Harry Potter. It makes the world feel massive, in each episode we meet a different Greek god. Who explains some backstory, we know there’s a long history with these characters.
Another thing I think this show gets right are the characters. Like I said, I’m not a die hard fan of Percy Jackson. I have read the first book, but that was back in 6th or 7th grade. So the way I thought the characters were characterized, might not be too faithful to the source material. But I liked our main trio of characters, they were fun. They all had fun personalities about them, you bought into the chemistry amongst the three of them. Mainly want to talk about Percy Jackson himself, he really is given a hero’s journey character arc. At the beginning of episode 1, he thinks his life is normal. He's living in NYC with his mom. But as the season goes along, he gets heroic moments, he grows and changes through-out the season. The actor who’s playing Percy is Walker Scobell. Who’s first role was acting opposite Ryan Reynolds in The Adam Project. Ryan Reynolds is one of the funniest people in Hollywood, he’s keeping up with him, he’s throwing jokes back at Reynolds. As soon as I saw that movie, I knew I wanted to see him in more things. So I was very excited when he was cast in this role. He’s really good, he’s one of the best child actors working today. I’m sure he’s going to have a big future in front of him. Then our two other leads, Grover and Annabeth are just fun additions. The actors didn’t pop as much as Walker or Percy. But for the types of characters they are, the characterizations they are solid in what they do.
I think this show proves that adapting books into tv shows instead of movies can work. So many books have been adapted into movies whether it’s Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, or Twilight. Those movies are often criticized for trying to cram too much into one movie that’s about 2 to 2 ½ hours long. But when you have an 8 episode long season, you can pretty much adapt the entire book. There’s a lot in this tv show that isn’t in movies. Because here they had 6-7 hours to tell the story, while that only had 2 hours. So you feel like our characters have gone on character arcs, you feel like they’ve grown and changed through-out the season. I hope this show gets enough buzz that other studios learn from this. There’s rumors about WB rebooting Harry Potter, you can easily do 8-10 episode long seasons, each season is a different book. I think we’ve gotten to a time with tv shows where sometimes it’s better than movies. They have the same budgets as movies and between the number of views of this show. And the praise and numbers for The Last of Us. Maybe books and video game adaptations should start to be tv shows instead of movies.
Finally, this is a Disney production, this tv show has a lot of money put into it. I’m not sure what the budget for the show is, but it looks just as good if not better than modern day blockbusters. You get a lot of fun Greek god action in here, it all looks cool. We get minotaurs showing up in Chicago, flying demon creatures in New York City. It just looks very professional, it doesn’t look sloppy with how it’s put together. Maybe there's a couple of weak CGI spots here and there, but nothing that pulls you out of the moment or the episode.
The Bad:
The first thing that comes to mind is some of the casting for the god is very much stunt casting, therefore it’s distracting when it’s on screen. Some of the gods are played by actors that I’m not familiar with. Hades, Ares, and Poseidon I didn’t recognize. Or if they were on in something I’d seen, it was a smaller ole. But there’s other times where they get Jason Mantzoukas, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Lin Manuel-Miranda, and Lance Reddick play gods that are really only in one or two episodes. Lin Maunel-Miranda is a guest star in episode 6. It’s so distracting that you don’t see the character all you see is the actor portraying the character. I haven’t read the books after the first one, I’m not sure how many new gods we’ll meet. But I hope they dial back a bit on the stunt casting. It’s not that the actors they got were bad, Lin Maunel-Miranda knows how to be fun and charming. Lance Reddick can bring the right energy to Zeus. But I wish they got actors that have a screen presence, but that’s not distracting from the characters.
Another problem, the middle portion of the season can get very repetitive. Episodes 3-6 are basically our characters going to a destination to meet a mythical creature, they have a conflict and they right onto the next episode and the same thing happens. It’s not that those episodes are bad, episode 5 is one of the best episodes of the season. But after a while, you know what to expect. It wasn’t a big issue with the season, it didn’t drastically hold back my thoughts on the season. I get that’s part of the problem when adapting a book, since the plot goes from point A to point B. That can happen, I felt like there was a way to change some of that up to make it flow a bit better.
Final Thoughts: I was excited for this show, I wasn’t super excited as many other people were. I thought this season was really good, I really dug it and I thought they did a great job of being faithful to the source material. They nailed the casting for our characters. There’s some issues with the stunt casting and the pacing, but overall this is a really solid season. Disney+ has some great tv shows from Marvel and Star Wars, this is one of the best Disney+ original tv shows we’ve gotten. I’m excited for season 2 and I hope it’s gets greenlit for another season shortly.
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