Percy Jackson and the Olympians is an American fantasy television series created by Rick Riordan and Jonathan E. Steinberg for Disney+ based on the books. The series is more purposefully silly than many of its fellow YA fantasy books.
It takes place in an alternate reality where the gods, monsters, heroes, and creatures of Greek mythology live among the world’s naïve humans. In this universe, monsters like Medusa, the gods of Mount Olympus reside above the Empire State Building, and Hades’ Underworld is appropriately situated beneath the streets of Los Angeles. Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell) has been getting visions of creatures like rhinoceros and centaurs ever since he was young.
As soon as he turned 12, he started getting attacked by monsters that were trying to kill him. Percy’s best friend Grover (Aryan Simhadri) is a satyr, whose job it is to protect him from any monsters that come Percy’s way. His mother takes him to a lake house to explain why he is seeing what he is seeing. He finds out that his father is Poseidon, a god who was in love with his mother, and that he is a Demigod because his mother is human.
Percy goes to a camp to learn about people more like him and to be protected. That’s when he meets Annabeth (Leah Jeffries), whom he has a hard time trying to get along with. At the camp, he learns that Zeus believes that Percy stole the master bolt for his father. He plunges into a quest with Annabeth and Grover to save his mother from the underworld and to prove his innocence.
This television version has been getting hate from fans for the casting of these three main characters. In the book, Percy has brunette hair, but in the movie, he is blond, which seems to irritate a lot of people. The casting for Annabeth gets to people’s skins because, in the books, she is a blonde girl with blue eyes, but she was cast in the show as an African American. All in all, I think this is a great show to get into if you loved the series. I think this television series is better than the movie because the scenes aren’t rushed and more characters get screen time than the movie. I give this show a 4/5.
