Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a 2023 young adult urban fantasy show streaming on Disney Plus based on the immensely successful novel series and novel expanded universe by Rick Riordan.

This show is a study in the art of pacing.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians was the series that made me fell in love with reading. My older brothers read the series as it came out, but I wasn’t into reading at the time. We were going on a vacation and I didn’t want to bring my DS on the trip, so my brother offered to me the first three books of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, and The Titan’s Curse. I told him I wouldn’t need three books, I could barely finish one. He told me it’s better to be prepared.

I finished The Lightning Thief on the long plane ride and our first night at the hotel. I finished The Sea of Monsters by the a few days later, and almost finished The Titan’s Curse by the end of the vacation.

Somehow, although I had never been really into reading anything besides half picture, half word books made for young kids, I plowed my way through Percy Jackson. They made me fall in love with reading.

Many people think the Percy Jackson movies from 2010 and 2013 are garbage. I don’t necessarily think they’re bad. They’re just unfaithful adaptions that are kind of boring. (We’ll have to talk about the art of adaption one day. My views are probably different from most book readers and movie watchers.)

When I heard that Rick Riordan would be creating and producing a Percy Jackson TV series for Disney Plus, I was cautiously optimistic. On the one hand. Rick Riordan is the creator. He should have more pride in his source material. And a TV show is almost always better for adapting a book than a movie because the longer episodic runtime fits the structure of books.

On the other hand, the books feature a lot of hilarious internal monologue and sass from Percy Jackson that might be hard to adapt. Not only that, but Disney has had an awful track record lately, with awful movies in Star Wars, Marvel, and otherwise that have been flopping horribly. (Sixth months ago, I predicted that lots of Disney’s 2023 lineup would flop. The flop was more spectacular than I had even predicted). And, Rick Riordan’s sequel projects–The Kane Chronicles, Heroes of Olympus, and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard–to Percy Jackson weren’t nearly as good as the original series, though I’d be willing to listen to arguments otherwise. In addition, Percy Jackson was definitely put together as the series went on; elements like the claiming of minor demigods and demigods betraying Camp Half-Blood are only introduced in the third book, The Titan’s Curse, which fuel the whole second half of the series. And extremely important character who was supposed to be at Camp Half-Blood while Percy was there is only introduced in Book 4, The Battle of the Labyrinth. Basically, there’s some series-long plodding that actually could be improved in an adaption, but attempting to improve it might only make it worse.

My wife and I finally finished Percy Jackson a few days ago. It took us awhile. Why?

“This show is kind of boring,” she said. “It’s just so… slow.”

I had to agree with her.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney Plus is a study in the subtle art of pacing.

Pacing

Pacing is one of the trickiest aspects of storytelling to pin down.

Pacing is how fast or how slow a story feels.

Of course no story is uniform; some stories start slow and ramp up the tension and intensity. Most stories go up and down and up again depending on the hour, minute, or even second. Fast or slow doesn’t necessarily mean bad; it’s whether or not you can keep someone’s interest through the fast or slow.

Take, for example, the opening scene of the historical fiction World War II movie, Inglorious Basterds. You can watch the whole 20 minute scene here. To summarize, a Nazi officer who works as a Jew hunter comes into a French man’s home. He’s been inspected for possibly hiding Jews, but he passed. Colonel Hans Landa, though, knows better. He asks Monsieur LaPadite a series of questions and tells some stories, eventually revealing he knows that LaPadite is hiding Jews in his floorboards. They soldiers try to kill them, but one of the girls escapes.

It’s a long scene. 20 full minutes. How can a conversation like that keep your interest?

We don’t actually know LaPadite is “guilty” until 10 minutes in exactly. The camera pans down to reveal the Jews, and the entire tenor of the conversation is changed. In addition, there’s obvious tension in any conversation with a Nazi officer, even if he’s just talking about the quality of your milk. There’s danger. There’s tension. There’s intensity, even as Hans Landa waxes racist Nazi philosophy at LaPadite. There’s a ticking clock you can’t hear when the conversation starts but gradually builds and builds as LaPadite has a decision to make for his life. There isn’t music or any other cues until the 17 minute mark. It’s just two men and lives hanging in the balance. What could be routine is not.

That is pacing. That scene flies by, and it’s over before you know it even though it is long. It feels fast, even though it really isn’t. It’s actually so good that I started rewatching the scene to write the blog and suddenly several minutes had gone by and I didn’t even notice. It’s a slow, measured scene, but you’re not bored. Never bored.

Of course, there’s an element of subjectivity to it. However, while the achieved effect is subjective, the data that attempts to communicate the pacing is objective. You can analyze the kinds of dialogue: whether it repeats information or adds information, or is in character or not, does each character feel distinct, is the dialogue is plot-relevant or full of fluff that distracts. You can analyze the editing and cinematography: are the cuts quick or steady or something else; are the distances of shots varied from conversation to conversation and from person to person or are they repetitious; do the cuts follow the same patterns every time. You can analyze the acting: are all of the line deliveries in the same tone of voice and cadence, do the conversations overlap back and forth or does everyone wait for their turn, do the actors convey multiple emotions with their entire body or do they use similar expressions and mono-emotions.

If you analyze the data, you can reach some sort of understanding of how fast pacing is, or how slow it is.

To be clear, slow pacing isn’t bad in it of itself; nor is fast pacing good. In my review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I talked about how the pacing of that movie was frantic. There were no slower moments, no explanations, no exploring, just right from the next thing to the next to the next to hide the holes that were forming in plot, character, and worldbuilding. The effect is one that is dazzling; it’s easy to be dazzled the first time you watch The Force Awakens. But it doesn’t stick with you because it’s incredibly shallow and on rewatches, it’s boring.

Fast or slow isn’t necessarily bad. It’s the variety that counts. Even with fast pacing, you need slower moments. Even in slow pacing, you need faster moments.

Percy Jackson’s Pacing

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a boring show because its pacing feels slow due to a lack of tension.

A major change from the source material is that in every encounter with a god or monster, the Percy Jackson gang of friends (he has two friends, the satyr Grover and the demigod Annabeth) already knows what’s happening going into it.

Case in point:

Their first major monster encounter in the books is with Medusa. They stumble on a diner because they’re starving called Auntie Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium. Grover is initially very skeptical, smelling monsters. After getting a burger, they talk with an old but kind Middle Eastern lady behind the counter. The three sit down and chat until they realize something’s off. Grover thought he recognized one of the gnomes out front of a Satyr. Suddenly they realize “Auntie Em” is Medusa, and the Satyr Gnome is really Grover’s uncle Ferdinand. They run and split up in the Garden Gnome Emporium, trying to outsmart Medusa, using all the tools at their disposal to do so.

In comparison, in the show, they get there and immediately Annabeth says, “This is Medusa’s lair. See? It says Auntie Em.” However, they can’t get out because a Fury is blocking their exit. Medusa offers to take them in, where she says she is angry at the gods for being so abusive and mistreating. Medusa takes Percy aside, offering to turn his friends into stone so that he can go and be free of the abusive gods. He runs away and the gang quickly outsmarts Medusa in her maze of a basement.

Notice the difference.

In the book, Grover is sounding the alarm. Something is bad here, he says. But I DON’T KNOW WHAT.

That uncertainty is what breeds suspense. We don’t know what’s going to happen. When the mystery is solved, everything comes crashing in. There’s panic. There’s uncertainty. Percy is taken off guard. The team is forced to work together for the first time. They have to rely on each other to win.

In contrast, in the show, there’s no uncertainty. We know that Medusa is Medusa. There’s no mystery. It’s only a matter of when. Grover, too, is diminished into comic relief the whole scene rather than having his useful “monster smelling” incident: he actually catches on before Annabeth, leading to differentiating their unique skill sets. Yes, Annabeth is smart, but she doesn’t have gut feeling the way Grover has.

In addition, pacing-wise, we add up all the suspense of Medusa, and you expect the show to take its time with the fight afterward. However, it’s over in a few minutes and is pretty one-note. They hide, they plan, the plan works. There isn’t ups and downs, a plan not working and then working, panic where they try to get back together, or Medusa almost turning someone to stone but then they get away. In a book, where you have more internal dialogue, you can have less action by the characters because you have the up-and-down pacing of their thoughts. But when all you have is their words and actions, you need the up-and-down of pacing and intensity to be in their actions. The show has struggled to adapt from book to show.

Yes, the adaption tries to work in that whole “angry at the gods” dynamic earlier than the books did, and so could be a more cohesive series because of that. But it’s done rather clunkily by ruining the suspense of the scene and offering Percy a proposal that there’s no way he would ever accept. There’s no panic and “Oh-My-Gosh-What-Are-We-Doing.” The group always feels in control and it feels so inevitable. Yes, there is suspense, and pacing-wise you could say “Oh, it’s ups and downs; the conversation around the table and THEN the action! And Medusa is a sympathetic villain who’s gone down a dark path due to the abuse in her life. That’s interesting!” But it doesn’t feel interesting because there isn’t really any suspense. We’re just waiting for her to finish talking so that the action can start because we know it’s going to start.

Why not hide her identity? You can still work in the whole “angry at the gods” dynamic. She’s hiding her identity inside when she begins talking about her “boss” or something who hurt her and changed her life. Annabeth realizes who this is and goes invisible. Percy panics, running for the basement. In the basement, perhaps Medusa goes on a rant, clawing her way through and getting oh-so-close to Annabeth or Grover or Percy hiding. Suspense. Panic.

Then, maybe if you do want to create that “not giving them away” throughline to the episode, Medusa offers a deal. “Surrender yourself, Percy,” she says, “and I’ll let you go. Give up and tell me where your friends are, and you’ll be safe and free from the gods. Isn’t that what you want?” That is a much more reasonable request than “Oh, while we’re just sitting here talking, I’ll turn them to stone, Percy. Won’t you like that?”

But as it is, the scene feels slow. It’s not any slower than Inglorious Basterds. In fact, it’s faster than that scene! But it doesn’t feel that way because it’s not set up with any mystery.

Add the acting on top of that. I have nothing against the three actors for the main crew personally. There are moments of good acting from them. It seems also that Walker Scobell, who plays Percy, is also a really great young stuntman, doing most of his own stunts for the show and learning sword choreography. He does a great job, and his swordfight with the god Ares at the end of the show is actually well choreographed and performed, though it is once again super short.

But none of the three deliver good performances here. Almost all of their lines are in the same cadence, the same up-and-down. They don’t show panic or uncertainty. They seem to have three modes: happy-joking, semi-intense exposition, and semi-sad. Their lines also blend into each other, each of them not having a unique voice or way of speaking or vocabulary choice. A lot of the humor from the books is gone, too, made way for just more exposition before each event. But if you’re just delivering information over and over again in, frankly, poorly delivered and acted dialogue, it gets slow. It feels slow.

The Medusa event happens every. Single. Time. The Lotus Hotel and Casino? Know what it is right when they walk in. The stretching monster Percrustes? Know who he is and instantly outsmart him. The Master Bolt secretly in Percy’s backpack? Rather than finding it right when they’re talking with Hades, they discover it before they talk to him. Every, single, time, the suspense is ruined because there’s no mystery, no “I don’t know.” These scenes are incredibly boring because you don’t have a reason to care about the Lotus Hotel and Casino’s threat, or Medusa’s threat. Once you’re in the thick of it, then you care who this person is and why. Every, single, time, we get all the exposition before the event, and then the event happens as they said it would happen. We just walk right into it with no panic or solution-making or character-dynamic-ing. Everything blends together into a puddle.

Every god is kind of goofy, but also kind of serious. There isn’t the variety we saw in the book, where Hades is a forboding menace who Percy and Grover barely escape from. He’s just like the other goofs in the show, a guy in his pajamas. No variety. No differences. And again, Percy and Grover are completely in control of the situation and made an offer they have no choice but to refuse. “Oh, stay down here with me so you’ll be safe from Kronos.” No difference. No suspense.

Boring

“This show is kind of boring,”

I could go into all the differences with the source material. But really, that doesn’t matter. A show or movie can be different from the source material and actually be – gasp – better than the book. There are things you can do in shows or movies that you can’t do in books. You can leverage the medium.

Instead, as one reviewer I read put it, this feels like the SparkNotes summary of the book. None of the drama or action or suspense. None of the mystery. None of the fun. It’ll satisfy some fans because if you read the SparkNotes of the books and the SparkNotes of this show, they’d be fairly similar. “See? It’s faithful because it looks like the book!” But just because you could summarize it the same way doesn’t mean it is the same. One is full of personality, fun, suspense, drama, and life. It was so good it made me fall in love with reading. The other is just kind of boring.