Percy Jackson And The Olympians Season 2 Review: A Faithful But Flat Adaptation

Rick Riordan's beloved series "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" is back on the small screen, with characters a little bit older and wiser (and in the case of Percy himself, quite a bit taller) than they were in the first season. The series gives Riordan's sprawling narrative more space to breathe than we would see in a film adaptation, although it does still feel as though it's leaping from plot point to plot point occasionally. The flaws that plagued the first season — inconsistent performances, dodgy CGI — still run rampant here, but there's an appreciation of the source material that will keep devoted fans of the "Percy Jackson" book series on board.

It's the end of the school year for Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell), and the vibes are most decidedly off. After the chaos of their quest from the first season, Percy has been separated from his best friends, the satyr Grover (Aryan Simhadri) and Annabeth Chase (Leah Sava Jeffries), a daughter of Athena. (It's hard for them to contact each other since monsters can track cell phones, which is very convenient from a plot perspective.) Over the course of the school year, Percy's wildcard mom has informally adopted the cyclops Tyson (Daniel Diemer), putting Percy in the reluctant position of taking care of the well-intentioned but extremely clumsy behemoth. And oh yeah, Hermes' son Luke (Charlie Bushnell) is still out and about, causing trouble wherever he goes. When Camp Half-Blood becomes suddenly vulnerable, Percy will have to embark on yet another quest, this time to recover the Golden Fleece and track down the missing Grover. But from a Percy-Annabeth friendship perspective, things are about to get complicated.

If it sounds like there's kind of a lot going on, that's because there is. As a full season of television, "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" has a bit more room to develop the book's narrative than it would if it were a movie, but it still feels rushed, with little room for anything but the briefest of character moments. The action set pieces take up a lot of screen time, and we're going from one to another without getting much of an opportunity to sit with the characters — and that's a shame, because they're a huge part of the reason that fans like the "Percy Jackson" books to begin with. The actors are older and more experienced at this point, but they're not really given too many opportunities to ... well, act.

And this leads to another problem that faces "Percy Jackson and the Olympians." We give it a lot of credit for its creative world-building, and how it gives viewers this fully realized universe where the Greek gods, monsters, and demi-gods are all walking around on Earth. But this is a television show, after all, and there are limitations to what they accomplish with CGI on a TV budget. The fact that this is such a special effects-laden series means that it's really tough to avoid that a lot of it unfortunately looks pretty cheap. Sometimes this has the result of taking you out of the story, while other times it just prevents viewers from engaging as deeply with some of the action sequences.

"Percy Jackson and the Olympians" also has tonal weirdness going on. The kids in the show are dealing with life or death situations, the destruction of their friendships, genuine threats to the only place in the world they've ever felt safe. The adults, on the other hand, are just a bunch of goofballs. There's a long tradition of kids' shows treating their adult characters like fools, to emphasize that the younger characters are capable and smart in their own right, but here it just feels strange to have Jason Mantzoukas and Timothy Simons hamming it up during such dire situations. Maybe this is just an effort to make "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" appeal to older audiences, but it doesn't quite work.

Together, all of these issues make "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" the kind of show that will appeal to the people it was always going to appeal to. The fans who are just thrilled to get more of one of their favorite franchises with largely book-accurate casting will find a lot to like here. But it's hard to imagine the show winning over audiences who aren't already familiar with the series, especially since it strips the narrative of so much of its personality in its efforts to fit everything in. It's not a disaster, but it lacks the charm that made the original books so popular in the first place.

"Percy Jackson and the Olympians" premieres on Disney+ on December 10.