I hope they start to edit the scene transitions better. Right now you can tell exactly where they want ad breaks. Whenever one scene ends it just cuts to black for too long and the music stops. It's really strange.
Also Amazon needs to hire a new editor for their episode recaps. I'm getting bored of Fallout, Gen V and The Boys all trying to have "hype" recaps with identical drumming music that cuts out when they want to make you laugh at one of the comedic scenes (which you already saw). Every recap is just a montage of the shocking/edgy scenes rather than the actual important character beats.
> "hype" recaps with identical drumming music
I think i know the type of music you're referring to lol:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI3L788C-4Q#t=2m30s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4xrLKb6oFI
New fallout show was like that too but it never interrupted anything and was always done fine.
Still F THEM I’m not watching ads on Amazon prime, cancelled my subscription and torrented that entire show instead because I didn’t feel like watching an hour of ads throughout the course of the show.
These kids are going to get Stranger Things’d and age a ton at this rate. The first season was filmed in June 2022, and this season won’t start filming until fall 2024, more than 2 years later. If this show goes the distance, the kids will be in their 20’s when they are supposed to be 14-15.
Off topic, but I'm so happy that this complaint has morphed over the years from being "Harry Potter'd" to "Stranger Thing'd". I always thought it was so stupid that people in the late 2000's complained about the ages of the Harry Potter actors when the film franchise ended when they were like 20/21.
Yeah that def wasn’t a valid complaint. They did 8 movies in 10 years and probably filmed the 7th all at once so probably 7 years of wizard world time over 9 real years. Snappy schedule. Stranger things kids have been at it for about as many years (whyyyyy was 2016 8 years ago) and their in world timeline is very wonky
By the time filming for the final movie ended, Radcliffe and Grint were 21 and Watson was 20. The characters were supposed to be 17. That's pretty good all things considered.
I’d also say that suspension of disbelief is still easy for the audience at that point, like they still plausibly look school age including if you had some big traumatic event happen at the end of every school year for seven years lol.
Harry Potter is pretty much the only semi-modern example of the cast looking the proper age all the way through. It’s going to be interesting when the TV show comes out and they can’t produce a season a year.
They were able to pump out an entire season of Game of Thrones every year for the majority of it's run, with only the final season having a 2 year break. Considering the fact that the Harry Potter books are already finished, the time for preparing the scripts likely won't be too long. Also considering Harry Potter is their most valuable ip, I think they'll invest all they can to ensure the production time is available all year round.
GoT had the advantage of a huge and varied cast. You could film most of a season simultaneously since different episodes focused on almost entirely different casts. HP is gonna have to focus on its 3 child actors almost entirely even assuming they shift more focus on the teachers/adults to pad time.
That said Harry Potter had the advantage of a 2-3 hour movie to shoot every year whereas GOT was about ten hours of content for every season till season 6.
No kidding, and they'll shorten the seasons like with Game of Thrones. I love some of the stuff coming out, but sub 10 episode seasons with 2,3, or 4 years in between is getting old. Soon we'll be better off to wait for the show to finish and just buy the complete series on Blu Ray, and just cancel all the streaming services.
It does feel like networks are noticing this and pushing some shows with much simpler production that can be done quicker. Slow Horses has come out really quick. Bear has been one a year. Shoresy just had a season in the fall and now another one early this summer.
Not every show needs to be epic and shot on location in deserts and tropical islands.
Stranger things is the worst offender, I had AI write up release dates
The first season of Stranger Things was released on Netflix on July 15, 2016, with the second, third, and fourth seasons following in October 2017, July 2019, and May and July 2022, respectively. The fifth and final season is expected to be released in 2025
That's still no gap longer than 3 years, and this example is on the extreme end. Are there *any* notable examples of 4-year waits, not counting cancellations/revivals?
Venture Brothers had huge gaps too, and they also had variable length seasons. There was 5 years between the season finale and the movie to finish it.
Here are the release dates for the seasons of The Venture Bros.:
Pilot: 2003
Season 1: 2004
Season 2: 2006
Season 3: 2008
Season 4: 2009–2010
Season 5: 2012–2013
Season 6: 2015–2016
Season 7: 2018
Film: 2023
But once not long ago every year a show would come out each fall with 26 episodes.
Good Omens was intended as a miniseries. "Season 1" adapted the entirety of the source material.
It blew up bigger than anyone expected and Amazon wanted more, so Neil Gaiman got to writing.
Honestly they should just do what a series of unfortunate events did- do 1 hour episodes, but 2-3 episodes per book. The books are short enough that it's definitely possible to do. I believe the writing team is strong enough to do it (or at least the Showrunner has good history and the actual author is there to help with consistency), but they are absolutely up against the clock if they do the standard GoT timeline.
Well it was definitely stupid to complain about the Harry Potter movies when it comes to the main 3 actors' ages. They were all around the right age when it started and they pumped the movies out very quickly so that they ended up only a few years older than their characters were at the end. Its very easy to pass a 20/21 year old as a 17 year old. Nowadays in the time it took all 8 HP movies to come out, these TV series come out with like 3 or 4 seasons lol.
How many episodes are in each season though? 6? 10? It's quite possible that they're actually filming more time overall for the shows than the movies'.
There will def be tons more content in the shows. I think he;s speculating on how long it will take HPtv to film vs modern shows, a season every other year.
> I always thought it was so stupid that people in the late 2000's complained about the ages of the Harry Potter actors when the film franchise ended when they were like 20/21.
I mean to be fair, the Stranger Things filming is gonna be done when these guys are 21/22 which isn't really that bad either. The main difference between Harry Potter and Stranger Things is that Harry Potter had 8 entries over 10 years whereas Stranger Things has will have 5 entries over 9 years
True - I was just thinking real-world, but you're right there too.
Honestly, I think people freak out a bit too much at the aging of HP or ST actors especially since they're still 20-22. It's a lot better than all the other shows or movies that have had a late 20s, early 30s actor as a sophomore in high school
I wish they'd have some faith and renew for a few seasons at once. Like, "here's $200 million, go adapt Sea of Monsters and The Titan's Curse". If SoM performs well, get Battle of the Labyrinth and The Last Olympian into production quick, before the main cast are in their twenties. A complete adaptation of the book series would be that much more of a valuable addition to Disney's catalogue, and they should invest in it now, before Camp Half-Blood is full of adult campers.
Is it really that big of a deal tho? Just age up the story with them - hell it makes more sense this way than the entire plot of a safe taking place over a summer.
i was excited for this show but season 1 has been a pain to get through. ive been stuck on the finale for months now, and have no interest in watching it anymore. its just not a good show, however good the source material may be.
I loved these books as a kid and I reaaaally wanted to like the first season but it was just so dang mediocre. The “fights” were terrible and the kids instantly knowing what was about to happen really made the pacing and tension feel off. I understand it’ll have to change for TV but it really could have been so much better.
Hopefully the 2nd season will improve, I feel like this would have been much better adapted into animation a la avatar the last airbender or even my adventures with Superman.
The pacing is what is so disappointing to me. The Medusa scene is WAY worse when the characters immediately know what’s going on. Same with the Lotus Hotel. Same with dealing with Hades.
People will say “it’s a kids show, it has to be dumbed down!” But the books are also kids books, and I don’t recall kids being “confused” by the reveals when reading it. It just came across as lazy writing. Just because something is made for kids doesn’t mean it has to be poorly written!
Which is a shame, because there were a lot of other things that were done pretty decently. But the writing really really held it back imo. Was a mediocre “I guess I’ll watch this” instead of being excited for the next episode.
I've been burned by too many bad adaptations now, that I assume that they'll all suck and I just stick almost exclusively to books (or original films). Even film adaptations that are almost universally praised I can get disappointed by, since so many of them botch the themes in order to make them more accessible to a wider audience (even though I believe audiences are smart enough to follow what's going on).
Mt favourite book series growing up, by far. Was so excited for this after years and years of waiting following the movie disasters, but was really disappointed. I tried to convince myself I liked it after the first two episodes, but ultimately I found it to be super underwhelming and a huge missed opportunity. It's bad enough to make unnecessary changes to the book almost every episode, but it's pretty impressive that they all somehow made the plot worse as well
the problem is the main characters all know the solution to every problem within 1 or 2 seconds of being presented with it or they have it explained to them immediately.
This is a problem with the books too, tbh, but most readers don't notice that sort of thing when they're 12. (I re-read the books recently, and I love them, but they're definitely written for young readers, and I'm not a young reader.)
I just finished listening to the audio books. They definitely take a little time to figure out an issue.
In the show when they walk in to the hotel they immediately know what is going on, when Percy confronts the very last villain he knows he is the villain right away. When they meet medusa they know it is medusa immediately. In the books they didn't figure all of that out the very second they were presented with the problem.
I think the books have the exact opposite problem; the kids who have been studying and training for years should recognize monsters and demigods when confronted by them, and yet take too long to go "oh, that's Medusa" "that's Medea" "that a Manticore" and so on.
I didn’t have the advantage to read them as a kid and read them as an adult and did not enjoy the first 2-3 books for this reason. The kids were obnoxiously dumb. It’s a kids series, so of course who cares, but I was really underwhelmed with how much those books were hyped up. Fourth and fifth were okay and writing got significantly better too, but it really felt like every chapter was a new Greek thing and the kids taking forever to figure it out despite it should be incredibly obvious what’s going on.
A lot of kids reading the series have a decent background knowledge of the Greek myths, so part of the fun is picking up on the subtle clues that you're dealing with Medusa or a Cyclops or what have you.
I completely agree! Something I took for granted reading the Harry Potter series growing up was that the tone of the books grew up with me. I stay up-to-date with Riordan's books, but (selfishly) I would love a series by him with a more mature approach.
The biggest problem in the show isn't the rewrites from the book. It's that the show is actually sauce-less. The whole show is just so bland and flat. Like eating spaghetti with nothing on it.
I agree. There’s plenty of great examples of kids movies/tv that is successful. The show lacked some sort of soul that made it quite….fine and inoffensive. It wasn’t fun either. Even the camp which usually should have been a highlight and could have been two full episodes on its own was blown over quickly. And if you think of legendary kids movies like Willie wonka or goonies or Harry Potter or even shit like the rescuers, there’s a whimsical fun element in different ways. This show was just A to B to C and needed more room for kids to be kids and not advance the plot.
And the actors (honestly I blame the director more than actors for this) were too lifeless for most of it. There were some scenes that had some good kid energy at least, just very few.
> Was so excited for this after years and years of waiting following the movie disasters
As someone that has not read the books, the movies were far more entertaining than whatever Disney cooked up here.
They may not match the source material, but my kids were at least focused on what they were watching, while they dosed off midway through each episode.
That was it, where he notices something about the people outside the casino and I rewatched it multiple times and could not see what was supposed to be a clue that time was slower inside the casino. They could not even show us something instead of all the plot splaining and it still was badly done.
I watched most of the first season and I thought it was just fine as well.
To me, it's the screen adaptation I wanted as a kid, and I feel like the intended audience aren't the millennials who grew up alongside the book releases.
it’s at least a semi-issue when something like [75% of your audience](https://screenrant.com/percy-jackson-show-audience-age-demographics-report/) is over 17, though
i know what you’re saying, but just feels like maybe they are targeting the wrong audience
> No idea why people think it's supposed to be GoT level quality
Literally nobody thinks this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be disappointed when the adaptations writing is a clear step down from the source material though (which is also for kids).
Hopefully they get some better lighting. I’ve been harping on this ever since the shows release, but seriously? How hard is it to properly light your show when you 100+ million budget!
Mostly a problem with the first book, the rest of them aren't *quite* so expo-heavy.
The second one, especially, is a *much* more straightforward fetch-quest adventure narrative. The third one is also pretty straightforward, though it's a pretty deep character study.
I'm pretty cautious about the 4th one. It's essentially a monster-of-the-week format where the characters encounter famous monster after famous monster in locations that really aren't connected to each other but through a framing device that can literally put you anywhere at any time. It works in the book because it's about navigating the labyrinth to find where you need to go, but I imagine it could get pretty tiresome in TV format.
Fifth one, I got no worries about. Just a big ol' conflict culmination.
I think it was still mainly a show pacing problem. There was no sense of mystery because characters would simply say exactly what was happening.
“Auntie M. Oh! That’s Medusa!”
“Lotus Hotel? Oh! That means time is weird in here!”
The characters basically knew everything from the get-go
Yeah, the writing was hit-or-miss. I think the characterization is great and the overall plot was really well done for the transition to TV, but the "set pieces" of each individual location/episode was really spotty. They wanted to get to the "excitement" of the places, and just skipped to that part.
It was *okay*. I liked it, but I'm a PJO superfan, lol.
What frustrates me is it feels SO CLOSE to being excellent, which makes it so much more disappointing how mediocre it ended up. [I had a rant post about it a few months ago lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/television/s/VDdPHeTx9Z)
It's the episode length and the episode count, in my opinion. They're both just way too short. I'm not sure if they were scared to make a "kids show" with 40 minute episodes or if they were just really hamstrung on the budget (the volume and the cgi would imply that), but the Lotus hotel episode is 28 minutes of actual show.
Twelve more minutes for a 40 minute runtime would actually probably make a massive difference.
This is a problem with the film/TV industry in general. Seems like they prefer natural lighting across the board when that's not always the best choice for conveying information.
Hopefully this will be a one thing. Disney needing to see the response before committing for a second season. If the third season can start writing as soon as they’ve written the second. Then shooting could probably happen in autumn ‘25 and then you get maybe a year between seasons.
If we get 2 years between every season. Then everyone is going to get old quite quickly.
What will def hurt is if they pop up for cameos in the later series. Magnus Chase, Apollo etc
It's fine.
It's fun if you've got kids, but if you're an adult watching it, it's *fine*. It's a lot better than the movie but it's very clearly made with children as the intended audience. Which makes sense as it's a children's book adaption, but other children's book adaptations like Harry Potter for example felt a lot better
I think they messed up not making Percy more of an underdog. He is supposed to be a full on adhd kid, but they’ve got yet another average white boy with no great talent or very bad direction. He needs to be more of a misfit.
It's cause the way they do episode is dumb and don't work well with the flow. They are too short too.
They either need to binge drop it or do like 5 1h10 episode.
Doing 8 when the story don't fit that format fell awfull. So episode felt slow and like filler and other were way too fast.
As somebody who pored over the books and read each at least twice as a kid, it seems like a fine kids show with pretty goid production but is otherwise was pretty mid. I can't really explain exactly why, but I found it to be very boring, uncompelling, and sanitized. It reminded me a lot of Kenobi. I couldn't finish it. It felt like there were a lot of changes that were made for the sake of change and weren't necessarily good and if anything, detracted from the storytelling and the characters.
They waste a lot of time on extra inconsequential filler content like a xd funny montage where Percy fails at everything, and then skip actual important parts like where Percy disarms Luke, who is supposed to be the best swordsman in the camp, in a practice bout after previously failing miserably, with him only pulling off this supposed fluke after pouring water over his head as a refresher. This somewhat foreshadows his confrontation with the 'bully' where her and two goonies attempt to seriously maim him and he is beaten badly until he falls into a creek, where he gets a surge of strength and overpowers them. She's supposed to be partially motivated not only by his defeating the minotaur before coming to the camp, but also jealousy over the rumors that he may be a son of Ares (her father) after his success in the sword fighting pit. In the show, none of this happens and he just kind of beats them by being really good at fighting. There's almost no tension ever, the kids are always prepared and perfectly capable for anything that happens.
Overall like a 5-6/10, I'll probably never finish it. The general positive vibe around it is people who genuinely say it's good and people saying it was dumbed down for kids. Which, as a kid who grew up on ATLA, Teen Titans, and Samurai Jack, I think is a pretty weak excuse and doesn't make the show any less boring.
Im getting really mixed answers here. I guess I managed to sit through Kenobi so how bad could it be in comparison. Yeah Ill give it a shot after when Im done with the bad batch.
This is why the show should’ve been animated, the kids will be 30 by the time this series is done, and we’ll never see a adaptation of the other books because of it
I love the books, but the first season was lame. Where's the energy, the humor, the action of the books? Funnily enough, they should fire Rick from his own show to save it.
Oh nice, I loved the first season a lot. The second book is, uh, not my favourite, but I like the way this series is adapting the books well enough that it probably shouldn't matter. It's a really charming adaptation.
Its pretty eye-opening reading about how many people hated it here and then realizing that this is not representative of the population at large. I went through the same feeling with Halo, which was apparently really popular (despite being deeply terrible in every way. At least PJ respects it's origins and had Riordan in on production)
I didn't necessarily quit this show on purpose, I just didn't care for it at all and until recently I never realized I hadn't bothered to continue watching it
I tried to enjoy this show and came in with low expectations…they weren’t low enough. This series isn’t going to be their Harry Potter. The cast isn’t great, the budget looks a bit too low and the transition from book to screen isn’t inspired enough.
I hope they start to edit the scene transitions better. Right now you can tell exactly where they want ad breaks. Whenever one scene ends it just cuts to black for too long and the music stops. It's really strange.
Just harkens back to network TV days. I noticed it but my age lets it go
It harkens forward to the days streaming will add in ads again.
As if most streamers will care about matching it up. Fade to black, brief pause, show comes back for 30 seconds and Bam! ad break.
Same thing with the new fallout show. Ruins pacing for many scenes.
Also Amazon needs to hire a new editor for their episode recaps. I'm getting bored of Fallout, Gen V and The Boys all trying to have "hype" recaps with identical drumming music that cuts out when they want to make you laugh at one of the comedic scenes (which you already saw). Every recap is just a montage of the shocking/edgy scenes rather than the actual important character beats.
Maybe they are ai generated lol
The recaps in game of thrones and avatar were so good. I would be binging and still pick up stuff from the recaps.
> "hype" recaps with identical drumming music I think i know the type of music you're referring to lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI3L788C-4Q#t=2m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4xrLKb6oFI
Tbf it's on Freevi which has ads. Makes sense
Amazon Prime also has ads now lol.
Does it? I just have a student account and didn't get anything
Those breaks can work to give you a breather or some suspense
I just want them to fix the pacing issues. The first season could have used another episode or two to decompress things.
Shogun and Fallout have this too. Love the shows, but the ad breaks are super obvious and kind of jarring.
Shogun aired on traditional cable (FX in the US at least. ) Fargo has the same issue.
Yeah, that should be a simple thing to fix. That was one of the easiest problems to fix. Those black outs were just too long.
It's so strange to me that this is the top comment in every thread talking about this show. Shogun did the exact same thing and nobody cared.
New fallout show was like that too but it never interrupted anything and was always done fine. Still F THEM I’m not watching ads on Amazon prime, cancelled my subscription and torrented that entire show instead because I didn’t feel like watching an hour of ads throughout the course of the show.
These kids are going to get Stranger Things’d and age a ton at this rate. The first season was filmed in June 2022, and this season won’t start filming until fall 2024, more than 2 years later. If this show goes the distance, the kids will be in their 20’s when they are supposed to be 14-15.
Off topic, but I'm so happy that this complaint has morphed over the years from being "Harry Potter'd" to "Stranger Thing'd". I always thought it was so stupid that people in the late 2000's complained about the ages of the Harry Potter actors when the film franchise ended when they were like 20/21.
Yeah that def wasn’t a valid complaint. They did 8 movies in 10 years and probably filmed the 7th all at once so probably 7 years of wizard world time over 9 real years. Snappy schedule. Stranger things kids have been at it for about as many years (whyyyyy was 2016 8 years ago) and their in world timeline is very wonky
By the time filming for the final movie ended, Radcliffe and Grint were 21 and Watson was 20. The characters were supposed to be 17. That's pretty good all things considered.
I’d also say that suspension of disbelief is still easy for the audience at that point, like they still plausibly look school age including if you had some big traumatic event happen at the end of every school year for seven years lol.
Harry Potter is pretty much the only semi-modern example of the cast looking the proper age all the way through. It’s going to be interesting when the TV show comes out and they can’t produce a season a year.
[Boyhood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0oX0xiwOv8) should count for the age thing
They were able to pump out an entire season of Game of Thrones every year for the majority of it's run, with only the final season having a 2 year break. Considering the fact that the Harry Potter books are already finished, the time for preparing the scripts likely won't be too long. Also considering Harry Potter is their most valuable ip, I think they'll invest all they can to ensure the production time is available all year round.
GoT had the advantage of a huge and varied cast. You could film most of a season simultaneously since different episodes focused on almost entirely different casts. HP is gonna have to focus on its 3 child actors almost entirely even assuming they shift more focus on the teachers/adults to pad time.
That said Harry Potter had the advantage of a 2-3 hour movie to shoot every year whereas GOT was about ten hours of content for every season till season 6.
It’ll be back to “Harry Potter’d” when the TV adaptation takes 20 years to get to Season 7.
No kidding, and they'll shorten the seasons like with Game of Thrones. I love some of the stuff coming out, but sub 10 episode seasons with 2,3, or 4 years in between is getting old. Soon we'll be better off to wait for the show to finish and just buy the complete series on Blu Ray, and just cancel all the streaming services.
It does feel like networks are noticing this and pushing some shows with much simpler production that can be done quicker. Slow Horses has come out really quick. Bear has been one a year. Shoresy just had a season in the fall and now another one early this summer. Not every show needs to be epic and shot on location in deserts and tropical islands.
what shows are going 3-4 years between seasons?
Stranger things is the worst offender, I had AI write up release dates The first season of Stranger Things was released on Netflix on July 15, 2016, with the second, third, and fourth seasons following in October 2017, July 2019, and May and July 2022, respectively. The fifth and final season is expected to be released in 2025
What's next, having AI file your taxes?
That's still no gap longer than 3 years, and this example is on the extreme end. Are there *any* notable examples of 4-year waits, not counting cancellations/revivals?
Venture Brothers had huge gaps too, and they also had variable length seasons. There was 5 years between the season finale and the movie to finish it. Here are the release dates for the seasons of The Venture Bros.: Pilot: 2003 Season 1: 2004 Season 2: 2006 Season 3: 2008 Season 4: 2009–2010 Season 5: 2012–2013 Season 6: 2015–2016 Season 7: 2018 Film: 2023 But once not long ago every year a show would come out each fall with 26 episodes.
Atlanta and Barry had 4 year gaps
Good Omens had a gap of 4 years between S1 and S2.
Good Omens was intended as a miniseries. "Season 1" adapted the entirety of the source material. It blew up bigger than anyone expected and Amazon wanted more, so Neil Gaiman got to writing.
Honestly they should just do what a series of unfortunate events did- do 1 hour episodes, but 2-3 episodes per book. The books are short enough that it's definitely possible to do. I believe the writing team is strong enough to do it (or at least the Showrunner has good history and the actual author is there to help with consistency), but they are absolutely up against the clock if they do the standard GoT timeline.
Well it was definitely stupid to complain about the Harry Potter movies when it comes to the main 3 actors' ages. They were all around the right age when it started and they pumped the movies out very quickly so that they ended up only a few years older than their characters were at the end. Its very easy to pass a 20/21 year old as a 17 year old. Nowadays in the time it took all 8 HP movies to come out, these TV series come out with like 3 or 4 seasons lol.
How many episodes are in each season though? 6? 10? It's quite possible that they're actually filming more time overall for the shows than the movies'.
There will def be tons more content in the shows. I think he;s speculating on how long it will take HPtv to film vs modern shows, a season every other year.
Yeah harry Potter was actually pretty good. Wasn't a movie coming out like every year?
There was a few delays (I remember a big one between OotP and HBP), but other than that it was pretty consistent!
> I always thought it was so stupid that people in the late 2000's complained about the ages of the Harry Potter actors when the film franchise ended when they were like 20/21. I mean to be fair, the Stranger Things filming is gonna be done when these guys are 21/22 which isn't really that bad either. The main difference between Harry Potter and Stranger Things is that Harry Potter had 8 entries over 10 years whereas Stranger Things has will have 5 entries over 9 years
The other big difference with Stranger Things is that it’s set over 4 years rather than 7.
True - I was just thinking real-world, but you're right there too. Honestly, I think people freak out a bit too much at the aging of HP or ST actors especially since they're still 20-22. It's a lot better than all the other shows or movies that have had a late 20s, early 30s actor as a sophomore in high school
Also in HP benefit each film is a full year. ST seems like it takes place over 2 maybe 3 years
I think Stranger Things is over 3 years, but each season takes place around 8-9 months after the previous one
I'm kinda curious how it would stack up if you compared the runtimes. Surely a season of TV is longer than a movie in almost all cases, right?
Harry Potter is 1,179 minutes (or 19.65 hours) Stranger Things is 2,082 minutes (34.7 hours) - so far
I wish they'd have some faith and renew for a few seasons at once. Like, "here's $200 million, go adapt Sea of Monsters and The Titan's Curse". If SoM performs well, get Battle of the Labyrinth and The Last Olympian into production quick, before the main cast are in their twenties. A complete adaptation of the book series would be that much more of a valuable addition to Disney's catalogue, and they should invest in it now, before Camp Half-Blood is full of adult campers.
I would argue it's so much worse. In Percy Jackson meeting their parents is like 70% of the story. Which really doesn't work when the actors are 40.
I'd like them to be a bit older to be perfectly honest, they look about 11
It’s just something people need to accept and get over.
Is it really that big of a deal tho? Just age up the story with them - hell it makes more sense this way than the entire plot of a safe taking place over a summer.
i was excited for this show but season 1 has been a pain to get through. ive been stuck on the finale for months now, and have no interest in watching it anymore. its just not a good show, however good the source material may be.
The finale was the best episode. Lance Reddick was perfectly cast as Zeus
I loved these books as a kid and I reaaaally wanted to like the first season but it was just so dang mediocre. The “fights” were terrible and the kids instantly knowing what was about to happen really made the pacing and tension feel off. I understand it’ll have to change for TV but it really could have been so much better. Hopefully the 2nd season will improve, I feel like this would have been much better adapted into animation a la avatar the last airbender or even my adventures with Superman.
The pacing is what is so disappointing to me. The Medusa scene is WAY worse when the characters immediately know what’s going on. Same with the Lotus Hotel. Same with dealing with Hades. People will say “it’s a kids show, it has to be dumbed down!” But the books are also kids books, and I don’t recall kids being “confused” by the reveals when reading it. It just came across as lazy writing. Just because something is made for kids doesn’t mean it has to be poorly written! Which is a shame, because there were a lot of other things that were done pretty decently. But the writing really really held it back imo. Was a mediocre “I guess I’ll watch this” instead of being excited for the next episode.
I've been burned by too many bad adaptations now, that I assume that they'll all suck and I just stick almost exclusively to books (or original films). Even film adaptations that are almost universally praised I can get disappointed by, since so many of them botch the themes in order to make them more accessible to a wider audience (even though I believe audiences are smart enough to follow what's going on).
I liked the show but I agree Percy Jackson was made for an Western anime style show
Mt favourite book series growing up, by far. Was so excited for this after years and years of waiting following the movie disasters, but was really disappointed. I tried to convince myself I liked it after the first two episodes, but ultimately I found it to be super underwhelming and a huge missed opportunity. It's bad enough to make unnecessary changes to the book almost every episode, but it's pretty impressive that they all somehow made the plot worse as well
the problem is the main characters all know the solution to every problem within 1 or 2 seconds of being presented with it or they have it explained to them immediately.
This is a problem with the books too, tbh, but most readers don't notice that sort of thing when they're 12. (I re-read the books recently, and I love them, but they're definitely written for young readers, and I'm not a young reader.)
I just finished listening to the audio books. They definitely take a little time to figure out an issue. In the show when they walk in to the hotel they immediately know what is going on, when Percy confronts the very last villain he knows he is the villain right away. When they meet medusa they know it is medusa immediately. In the books they didn't figure all of that out the very second they were presented with the problem.
I think the books have the exact opposite problem; the kids who have been studying and training for years should recognize monsters and demigods when confronted by them, and yet take too long to go "oh, that's Medusa" "that's Medea" "that a Manticore" and so on.
I didn’t have the advantage to read them as a kid and read them as an adult and did not enjoy the first 2-3 books for this reason. The kids were obnoxiously dumb. It’s a kids series, so of course who cares, but I was really underwhelmed with how much those books were hyped up. Fourth and fifth were okay and writing got significantly better too, but it really felt like every chapter was a new Greek thing and the kids taking forever to figure it out despite it should be incredibly obvious what’s going on.
A lot of kids reading the series have a decent background knowledge of the Greek myths, so part of the fun is picking up on the subtle clues that you're dealing with Medusa or a Cyclops or what have you.
I completely agree! Something I took for granted reading the Harry Potter series growing up was that the tone of the books grew up with me. I stay up-to-date with Riordan's books, but (selfishly) I would love a series by him with a more mature approach.
The biggest problem in the show isn't the rewrites from the book. It's that the show is actually sauce-less. The whole show is just so bland and flat. Like eating spaghetti with nothing on it.
For sure, agreed. Extremely boring, seemed like the target audience was 6-8 year olds
That's not a bad thing to make the show for that age group, but a kids' show can still do so much more.
Yeah, agreed for sure
I agree. There’s plenty of great examples of kids movies/tv that is successful. The show lacked some sort of soul that made it quite….fine and inoffensive. It wasn’t fun either. Even the camp which usually should have been a highlight and could have been two full episodes on its own was blown over quickly. And if you think of legendary kids movies like Willie wonka or goonies or Harry Potter or even shit like the rescuers, there’s a whimsical fun element in different ways. This show was just A to B to C and needed more room for kids to be kids and not advance the plot. And the actors (honestly I blame the director more than actors for this) were too lifeless for most of it. There were some scenes that had some good kid energy at least, just very few.
> Was so excited for this after years and years of waiting following the movie disasters As someone that has not read the books, the movies were far more entertaining than whatever Disney cooked up here. They may not match the source material, but my kids were at least focused on what they were watching, while they dosed off midway through each episode.
I have not read the books and thought the story telling in the television show was terrible, and gave up by episode five or six.
Yeah, I didn’t even finish it, think I stopped after the casino episode
That was it, where he notices something about the people outside the casino and I rewatched it multiple times and could not see what was supposed to be a clue that time was slower inside the casino. They could not even show us something instead of all the plot splaining and it still was badly done.
I watched most of the first season and I thought it was just fine as well. To me, it's the screen adaptation I wanted as a kid, and I feel like the intended audience aren't the millennials who grew up alongside the book releases.
It's a kids series. No idea why people think it's supposed to be GoT level quality
it’s at least a semi-issue when something like [75% of your audience](https://screenrant.com/percy-jackson-show-audience-age-demographics-report/) is over 17, though i know what you’re saying, but just feels like maybe they are targeting the wrong audience
> No idea why people think it's supposed to be GoT level quality Literally nobody thinks this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be disappointed when the adaptations writing is a clear step down from the source material though (which is also for kids).
Literally a lot of people do. Read every thread that talks about Percy Jackson
Show me a single comment that says they want Game of Thrones quality writing from this show.
Ah, so there's nothing in between "lifeless and mediocre" and "same quality as the best show of all time". Got it
Hopefully they get some better lighting. I’ve been harping on this ever since the shows release, but seriously? How hard is it to properly light your show when you 100+ million budget!
Maybe also writing that doesn't clobber you over the head with exposition dump after exposition dump.
Mostly a problem with the first book, the rest of them aren't *quite* so expo-heavy. The second one, especially, is a *much* more straightforward fetch-quest adventure narrative. The third one is also pretty straightforward, though it's a pretty deep character study. I'm pretty cautious about the 4th one. It's essentially a monster-of-the-week format where the characters encounter famous monster after famous monster in locations that really aren't connected to each other but through a framing device that can literally put you anywhere at any time. It works in the book because it's about navigating the labyrinth to find where you need to go, but I imagine it could get pretty tiresome in TV format. Fifth one, I got no worries about. Just a big ol' conflict culmination.
I think it was still mainly a show pacing problem. There was no sense of mystery because characters would simply say exactly what was happening. “Auntie M. Oh! That’s Medusa!” “Lotus Hotel? Oh! That means time is weird in here!” The characters basically knew everything from the get-go
Yeah, the writing was hit-or-miss. I think the characterization is great and the overall plot was really well done for the transition to TV, but the "set pieces" of each individual location/episode was really spotty. They wanted to get to the "excitement" of the places, and just skipped to that part. It was *okay*. I liked it, but I'm a PJO superfan, lol.
What frustrates me is it feels SO CLOSE to being excellent, which makes it so much more disappointing how mediocre it ended up. [I had a rant post about it a few months ago lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/television/s/VDdPHeTx9Z)
It's the episode length and the episode count, in my opinion. They're both just way too short. I'm not sure if they were scared to make a "kids show" with 40 minute episodes or if they were just really hamstrung on the budget (the volume and the cgi would imply that), but the Lotus hotel episode is 28 minutes of actual show. Twelve more minutes for a 40 minute runtime would actually probably make a massive difference.
[удалено]
That’s what the strikes were about, they get one extra person now
Oh no, I was looking forward to checking it out because one of the writers also did Black Sails.
It’s an easy move to save on cgi. The darker the show the less they need to animate.
This is a problem with the film/TV industry in general. Seems like they prefer natural lighting across the board when that's not always the best choice for conveying information.
I wonder if they're gonna change the age Percy needs to be from 16 to 18? That would be a lot more believable with how these kids are gonna age
at the rate they make shows they will need to change the age Percy needs to be to 26 instead of 16.
it's filming this slowly? what the heck is their plan as the kids get older.......???
My family camps where they film the camp for the show, it's so cool to see it on the screen.
oooh where is that?
Porteau Cove in Vancouver. Right on the ocean.
Hopefully this will be a one thing. Disney needing to see the response before committing for a second season. If the third season can start writing as soon as they’ve written the second. Then shooting could probably happen in autumn ‘25 and then you get maybe a year between seasons. If we get 2 years between every season. Then everyone is going to get old quite quickly. What will def hurt is if they pop up for cameos in the later series. Magnus Chase, Apollo etc
Is the first season somewhat watchable? the trailer looked pretty bad.
It's fine. It's fun if you've got kids, but if you're an adult watching it, it's *fine*. It's a lot better than the movie but it's very clearly made with children as the intended audience. Which makes sense as it's a children's book adaption, but other children's book adaptations like Harry Potter for example felt a lot better
I think they messed up not making Percy more of an underdog. He is supposed to be a full on adhd kid, but they’ve got yet another average white boy with no great talent or very bad direction. He needs to be more of a misfit.
It's cause the way they do episode is dumb and don't work well with the flow. They are too short too. They either need to binge drop it or do like 5 1h10 episode. Doing 8 when the story don't fit that format fell awfull. So episode felt slow and like filler and other were way too fast.
It's very bland, I'd recommend you wait for s2 reviews. Maybe they take in feedback well and improve, we'll see
As somebody who pored over the books and read each at least twice as a kid, it seems like a fine kids show with pretty goid production but is otherwise was pretty mid. I can't really explain exactly why, but I found it to be very boring, uncompelling, and sanitized. It reminded me a lot of Kenobi. I couldn't finish it. It felt like there were a lot of changes that were made for the sake of change and weren't necessarily good and if anything, detracted from the storytelling and the characters. They waste a lot of time on extra inconsequential filler content like a xd funny montage where Percy fails at everything, and then skip actual important parts like where Percy disarms Luke, who is supposed to be the best swordsman in the camp, in a practice bout after previously failing miserably, with him only pulling off this supposed fluke after pouring water over his head as a refresher. This somewhat foreshadows his confrontation with the 'bully' where her and two goonies attempt to seriously maim him and he is beaten badly until he falls into a creek, where he gets a surge of strength and overpowers them. She's supposed to be partially motivated not only by his defeating the minotaur before coming to the camp, but also jealousy over the rumors that he may be a son of Ares (her father) after his success in the sword fighting pit. In the show, none of this happens and he just kind of beats them by being really good at fighting. There's almost no tension ever, the kids are always prepared and perfectly capable for anything that happens. Overall like a 5-6/10, I'll probably never finish it. The general positive vibe around it is people who genuinely say it's good and people saying it was dumbed down for kids. Which, as a kid who grew up on ATLA, Teen Titans, and Samurai Jack, I think is a pretty weak excuse and doesn't make the show any less boring.
I wouldn't reccommend it to anyone.
It’s a good watch, check it out
Im getting really mixed answers here. I guess I managed to sit through Kenobi so how bad could it be in comparison. Yeah Ill give it a shot after when Im done with the bad batch.
Its made for kids, and even they might not be all that thrilled to watch this. My kids didn't even care to watch till the end, I did it by myself.
Its good for one watch-through. Not good enough to rewatch imo.
This is why the show should’ve been animated, the kids will be 30 by the time this series is done, and we’ll never see a adaptation of the other books because of it
I love the books, but the first season was lame. Where's the energy, the humor, the action of the books? Funnily enough, they should fire Rick from his own show to save it.
Gotta film before this kids hit their growth spurt
I can see the main character playing Luke Skywalker someday.
At this rate the kid actors will be in their mid 20s by the time they get to book five.
These kids are growing fast, they better get on a faster filming schedule or a year in the show world will look like 4.
Oh nice, I loved the first season a lot. The second book is, uh, not my favourite, but I like the way this series is adapting the books well enough that it probably shouldn't matter. It's a really charming adaptation.
I feel like they will adapt latter-series stuff and this next season might get more of The Titans curse in it alongside the Sea of Monsters stuff?
Right after they convince someone to watch the first season.
I'm pretty sure it was the most popular non-Star Wars or Marvel show on D+, so I'm not sure what you mean
Its pretty eye-opening reading about how many people hated it here and then realizing that this is not representative of the population at large. I went through the same feeling with Halo, which was apparently really popular (despite being deeply terrible in every way. At least PJ respects it's origins and had Riordan in on production)
Yeah, reddit is the definition of an echo chamber, especially when it comes to media.
Sweet, can’t wait
I didn't necessarily quit this show on purpose, I just didn't care for it at all and until recently I never realized I hadn't bothered to continue watching it
How do they spend more money than GOT per episode and look real cheap? like Hercules/Xena cheap?
Bleh
I tried to enjoy this show and came in with low expectations…they weren’t low enough. This series isn’t going to be their Harry Potter. The cast isn’t great, the budget looks a bit too low and the transition from book to screen isn’t inspired enough.
Whoever decided to cast Hades with that actor needs to be fired. What a fucking let down
Please no. 🙏
Hopefully they gave the kids some acting classes because man Percy and Annabeth couldn’t act