TV Talk: Disney+ successfully adapts Rick Riordan’s ‘Percy Jackson’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

After the success of the Harry Potter movie franchise, there were high hopes for the 2010 film “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” adapted from author Rick Riordan’s 2006 novel that paired Greek mythology with a coming-of-age story of friendship and adventure.

But the film underperformed and fans of Riordan’s books objected to the film’s deviations from the source material. There was one sequel (2013’s “Sea of Monsters”) but it did worse at the box office and the film franchise went moribund.

With Disney+’s eight-episode first season of “Percy Jackson & The Olympians, adapted from “The Lightning Thief ” by Riordan and showrunner Jon Steinberg (“The Rookie”), the saga is back in the embrace of its creator. The first two episodes stream today.

My 13-year-old son, who’s learned more about Greek mythology through Riordan’s books than I ever did in school, watched screeners with me and agrees that this adaptation delivers a more faithful rendering of the book’s story. The show also makes a few improvements along the way.

A self-described troubled kid, Percy (Walker Scobell, “The Adam Project”) has ADHD and dyslexia. The dyslexia, especially, is depicted with visual savvy on screen as words in a book move around as Percy reads.

Percy quickly announces in voiceover narration that he’s a half-blood — half-human, half-god — and viewers see how he’s expelled from school and seemingly betrayed by best friend Grover (Aryan Simhadri) after Percy lets loose powers he didn’t know he had and can’t control.

Percy’s mom (Virginia Kull) spirits him away to Long Island’s Camp Half-Blood, a sanctuary for demigod children where Percy meets Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries). By episode four, the trio of Percy, Annabeth and Grover are in a sprint across the country to find an entrance to the underworld beneath Los Angeles (of course that’s where it is!).

The casting is on point, particularly Simhadri, who brings a lovely gentleness to Grover. And the adult guest stars — terrific actors like Megan Mullally as Mrs. Dodds, Glynn Turman as Chiron, Jason Mantzoukas as Dionysus, Lin Manuel Miranda as Hermes — are spicey, welcome additions for parents watching “Percy Jackson” with their children.

There aren’t a lot of series these days that encourage co-viewing among children and their parents (in our house it’s pretty much just CBS’s “Ghosts” and Disney+s “Star Wars” shows), but “Percy Jackson” works for kids and adults thanks in part to the attention to detail in casting those guest stars.

Perhaps most refreshing in this era of bloated streaming service series, “Percy Jackson” episodes are not stretched beyond their breaking point. Instead, they’re refreshingly short, clocking in between 33 and 44 minutes over the first four episodes made available for review.

“We didn’t want anything to be in it that didn’t need to be,” said “Percy Jackson” showrunner Jon Steinberg in a Zoom interview this week. “A lot of that was driven by (the fact that) I would really like for my 7-year-old to be able to watch this, and everything had that lens applied to it.”

Steinberg confirmed that each season of the series will cover one book. He said Riordan was open to doing “a fairly invasive examination of” his book series and evinced a willingness to crack the story open and not be afraid to adjust it for the screen.

“When you’re an author who writes a five-book series, they don’t let you go back to the first one and redo it,” Steinberg said. “In a way, this was an opportunity for him as much as for anybody to notice things that developed later in the writing process and in later books and set them up and make them feel like they’re woven into page one, all the way from the beginning.”

One change made from the book that works better on screen is the depiction of Percy’s stepfather, Gabe, played by comic actor Timm Sharp (“Undeclared,” “’Til Death”). In the book, it’s unclear why Percy’s mother would be in a relationship with Gabe, who is depicted as growly and mean.

The Disney+ series puts a more comic spin on the character and the relationship.

“The target was set at (the ‘Seinfeld’ character) George Costanza, and we kind of worked backward from there,” Steinberg said. “There was a desire for you to understand that he is someone that Percy has a really hard time with and that we don’t care for. But I wanted to laugh along with everyone else in that process, too, and not have him be quite such a monster. And I think Rick was very happy to take a swing at that in a slightly different tone.”

Percy remains the heart of the story as he struggles to understand his origins and family through a lens that includes his ADHD.

“What’s so amazing about the books — and what we wanted to capture here — is there are so many access points for so many different experiences: kids who are going through different things, whether you feel like an outsider, learning differences, so many different ways to grab onto this story,” said “Percy Jackson” executive producer Dan Shotz. “We wanted to make sure through all the characters … that there were so many ways for people to connect to this.

“I think that’s why these books have resonated for the last 20 years around the world. Everybody can see themselves in these characters in some aspect.”