Over Winter Break, Disney Plus started releasing their live-action adaptation of the “Percy Jackson” book series. I was really into “Percy Jackson” as a kid, so I really wanted this new show to be good, but honestly, I was a bit disappointed.
Overall, I thought the show was decent. It had good casting, good set design, and the plot followed the first book in the series pretty closely, which I was glad to see. I think the main detriment to this show however, was the time constraints and the rushed nature of the production. They only had eight episodes to tell the story of the entire first book of the series, and a lot of the episodes were strangely short. I had figured that they were going to have timing issues, but seeing 30–45-minute episodes was surprising to me. Surely, if the production knew they were going to be having time constraints, they would make 45-minute or hour-long episodes.
This rushed pace leads to a number of other issues, such as the writing being borderline unwatchable in places, or characters being semi-omniscient and knowing things that they couldn’t possibly know. For example, two or three times within the series, the characters are able to instantly identify an ancient Greek monster just based on a rough shadow or silhouette. There’s one instance where Percy and his mom are being chased down a road by the Minotaur in the middle of the night, and Percy knows what it is immediately by seeing the shape of it when lightning lit up the area. Not only was the creature a couple hundred feet back, it also was dark out, and it was pouring rain. How could he have possibly seen that? He could even tell little details about it, like what it was wearing. That seems a little far-fetched to me, but I was willing to believe it until it happened again, and again, and again. This is obviously a way of moving the plot along and bringing the audience a little extra knowledge, but the way it’s done is so awkward and breaks a bit of the immersion of the show.
For background, the rough plot of this series focuses around Percy Jackson, the son of one of the Greek gods. The story follows his journey of what happens when he finds out about his father, and his encounters with monsters, gods, and other children of gods. It’s a very cool premise, and I loved reading about it as a kid. The issue is, there is so much world building in the book series, and even without the pacing problems of the Disney Plus show, they would have a hard time getting everything across that they wanted to. As a result, it just kinda seems like little plot mechanics that are specific to this world are pulled out of nowhere and just introduced to the audience very abruptly. This effect is a cool little homage to the fans who read the books, but I feel like it would confuse people who aren’t as familiar with the series.
As a synopsis, I think the “Percy Jackson” series on Disney Plus is a decent show, but mainly for the nostalgia value. As far as good writing goes, this series is not that good, which was disappointing for how hyped-up this series was. I would give the series two and a half stars out of five. Not great, but not abysmal either. It’s better than the “Percy Jackson” movie that was released a while back, but that’s not a real high bar.
