Look, I didn’t want to be a Percy Jackson TV show hater.

If you’re reading this because you think you might be a Percy Jackson TV show lover, my advice is to close this tab right now.

If you’re a normal viewer, reading this because you think it’s just interesting commentary, great. I envy you for being able to believe that people are casual about their favorite childhood book series.

But if you recognize yourself in these paragraphs — if you feel something stirring inside — stop reading immediately. You might be one of the haters. And once you know that, it’s only a matter of time before the TikTok TV critics sense it too, and they’ll come for you.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

I give these warnings because I was not a fan of Disney+’s new television adaptation of Rick Riordan’s beloved “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” even though I desperately wanted to be.

There are two unsuccessful, but admittedly deeply iconic, previous attempts at translating the series to the big screen in the early 2010s. Riordan has spent years trying to “normalize bad movie erasure”— a dig at the Chris Columbus-directed adaptations of “The Lightning Thief” and “Sea of Monsters.” 

Given the disappointment these movies caused, when production on the Disney+ show was announced, fans already had relatively low expectations. 

“Uncle Rick,” as longtime fans have lovingly dubbed Riordan, seemed pleased with the way the show was shaping up. As show creator and executive producer, he had been given more creative control than he had during the making of the original movies. 

And yet, if this TV show adaptation is any indication, it’s clear that while lighting never strikes twice, it may be able to miss twice. One thing’s for certain: there is a noticeable lack of “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga in this adaptation — perhaps that’s where things started to go wrong. 

Rather than an artful adaptation, Disney’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” is a sad copy and paste of its source material that reads as though it’s been run through ChatGPT. Riordan and the show’s other writers have spent too much time trying to cram the godly genius of the series into eight fleeting 40-minute episodes.

There seems to be an underlying fear throughout the script that viewers have not read the original source material. This makes for awkward bouts of exposition embedded in the dialogue and a simplification of the plot that makes the bibliophile in me wince. 

Perhaps to combat the anxiety that viewers will not have read the books, it seems that Riordan and the other writers spent too much time devising new, ‘exciting’ plot points — notably deviating from the book’s main climactic point. Perhaps this was an attempt to make the show’s woefully suspense-killing writing seem slightly more spectacular. 

The pacing is off — probably due to the extreme Disney-fication of the fight scenes that always seem to end in some perceived off-camera gore or bloodshed. The violence in the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” books was mild, and one might go so far as to say, tasteful. For a show based on books that tout the independence of teens, there’s an obvious catering to overbearing parents and guardians (it’s almost like the OG overbearing dad, Zeus, had a hand in making the show).

I wish I could say that acting saves the show, but the three main characters were underprepared to manage a script such as this. While Percy (Walker Scobell), Annabeth (Leah Jeffries) and Grover (Aryan Simhadri) set off on an impossible quest to save the world during the TV show, the actors set off on a possibly more difficult one: a quest to save the show from its script.

In all of his diminishing of the failed previous Percy Jackson movies, Rick Riordan got a big head. His books, beloved by so many for the way they bestowed power on teens, in particular, teens with learning differences (demigods in the books have dyslexia and ADHD, a facet based on Riordan’s own son), have yet to receive their justice in “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.”

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Twitter: @TabithaParent12

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