Spoiler-free

Twelve year old Percy Jackson learns that the stories of gods and monsters are real…

This house stans Percy Jackson. The younger people have read all the books, were disappointed by the movie adaptations and have been hoping for a television series for years.

Add to that the fact that Rick Riordan appears to be a genuinely nice person who has written inclusively across his stories and we went into this with, if not high hopes, then certainly expectations that it would exceed the blandness of the movies.

I’m here to say that the television show is good. The casting is excellent and the young cast holding the centre of the show together – Walker Scobel, Leah Jeffries and Aryan Simhadri playing Percy, Annabeth and Grover respectively – are fantastic, energetic and fresh. It’s easy to feel invested in their world, their concerns and the challenges before them.

Disney have clearly invested a good chunk into the production values here – the special effects are good, the sets and world building great, and the secondary cast feel rounded out and carefully put together, especially Jason Mantzoukas as Dionysus.

It’s also nice to see a series that isn’t tied into Marvel or Star Wars.

The opening episodes are tightly plotted and, if anything, whizz past a little too fast with some key moments feeling like they’re put on screen without enough explanation or without lingering enough to let them sink in. That’s a small quibble overall as there’s a lot to get through if they’re going to cover the first book in the Percy Jackson sequence; after all there are five of them, which gives us a good sense of where this is going if the first season finds its audience.

Given what I’ve seen so far it deserves to.

Rating? 8 tridents out of 10.

Stewart Hotston