‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ Team on Bringing Rick Riordan’s Books to TV

Rick Porter
·8 min read
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[This story contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+.]

To say that devoted readers of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Disney+ series based on them would be a Titan-sized understatement. A decade-plus after a pair of movies based on Rick Riordan’s best-selling novels left a bad taste with fans (and the author), the series, which Riordan co-created and executive produces, began streaming Tuesday night.

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Disney+ also moved up the premiere by a few hours, dropping the first two episodes at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT Tuesday — a day before the show’s previously scheduled debut. (The first episode will also stream on Hulu through the end of January.)

The show wasted little time in getting into the story: By the end of the first episode, Percy (Walker Scobell) had been kicked out of school, learned he’s the son of a Greek god and a mortal woman (Virginia Kull plays Percy’s mother), and battled a minotaur before arriving at Camp Half-Blood, the home away from home for young demigods.

As for the second episode? Just Percy getting acclimated to camp, trying to understand why his best friend, Grover (Aryan Simhadri), hadn’t said anything about Percy’s demigod status, facing down the kids from the Ares cabin and getting to know Annabeth Chase (Leah Sava Jeffries) right before getting thrown into a very intense game of capture the flag.

The story tracks pretty faithfully with the early chapters of The Lightning Thief, the first book in the series and the source material for the season — which, of course, is by design. As co-creator and co-showrunner Jonathan Steinberg put it to The Hollywood Reporter, having Riordan heavily involved in the series was a blessing.

“It wouldn’t really be possible any other way. Not only is the story so personal to Rick and [wife and producing partner] Becky and their sons and their family, but the relationship between Rick and the fans is really specific,” Steinberg said. “It’s a testament to how personal the story that he created is and how deeply it affects these people that they connect to him directly. We felt really fortunate to be able to build this thing with the guidance of the people who had the only standing, really, to make determinations about what belongs in and what belongs out. What is Percy Jackson and what is not Percy Jackson.”

THR spoke separately with Steinberg and co-showrunner Dan Shotz and with Rick and Becky Riordan about building the show’s world.

You’ve spoken about the logistics of getting the TV series off the ground before, but what conversations did you have among yourselves about adapting the books?

BECKY RIORDAN It was our whole family. And I think if we had the kids here, they would tell you a different thing probably than us. They had a lot of trepidation about their mom and dad going back and revisiting this. Rick and I had different conversations — what does this mean for us? How do we change the narrative? How do we make the dynamic work?

RICK RIORDAN We had to do kind of cost benefit analysis, just on a family level: Is this worth it? This sort of emotional weight of taking on a project this big at this point in our life.

Jon and Dan, how much did you know of the books before signing on to this?

JONATHAN STEINBERG A fair amount. A couple of years before the phone call came, we actually explored it and tried to track down what was going on with the property. I think it had sort of gotten lost in the [Disney-20th Century Fox] merger, where the rights sate, and we didn’t find out until later that some of it was just that Rick and Becky weren’t quite ready to engage with another adaptation. We had done some of the homework and just gave up on it when it didn’t seem like it was going to happen. So when the phone call came back in, it felt like fate a little bit. We had we gone searching for it, and then and then it showed up at our doorstep.

What were your first conversations like about turning the books into a series?

DAN SHOTZ When we started with them, it was during the COVID bubble. So we really had time to sit there on Zoom together, just the four of us, and really talk about the details of where this came from and what is most important to them. We also got to watch Rick explore something he wrote 20 years ago that he wanted to do to this story, stuff that he wanted to re-evaluate. That became a really fun process.

PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS
Leah Sava Jeffries as Annabeth

Rick, you’re a credited writer on the first two episodes, but what was your level of involvement on the rest of the season?

RICK RIORDAN I was involved in every writers room, I read every draft of every script, we gave notes on everything. So we were very intimately involved with every single episode. My big revelation was that this is very much a team sport. Writing for television is very different than me sitting alone in my office and just making up a novel, where the only person who would read it is probably Becky, so she could give me feedback. With a TV show, you’re all pitching in. It’s not the vision of any one person. It’s a collaborative vision. That was a really, really eye-opening experience for me. I enjoyed learning about that, and I think I learned a lot from it.

BECKY RIORDAN It makes [the show] better to have all those different opinions and all those different ideas and personal experiences all come and make the story even richer than it is on the page.

I watched the first two episodes with my kids, and one of the things they picked up on was Percy being a little less sarcastic than he is on the page, where the story is told all through his eyes. What did you have to change in writing this character for a different medium?

BECKY RIORDAN You can be a lot more sarcastic in your head than you would be in real life. We could have made a TV show like that, but I think it would have been very farcical, and it would be difficult to tell the serious part of the story. So we had to balance all those things together.

RICK RIORDAN I think that’s a great way to put it. It’s just a matter of readjusting the story to a format that’s not completely first-person internal monologue. But keep watching — the sarcasm is there.

Dan and Jon, you’ve written exclusively on shows aimed at adults before this. Does your approach change at all when you know the audience is going to include a lot of kids and families?

STEINBERG Less than you’d think. It’s a little bit of a different exercise in the sense that the show really does need to work if you’re 14 and if you’re 9. But to me, that was more about pacing and more about making sure that it worked for them, and less about writing down to an audience or censoring anything. I think we desperately wanted for this show to be for everybody. And that meant all the way down to my 7-year-old son — the hope was that it would be a little too scary for him, but not all the way. We got to a place where the storytelling and the emotional experiences were just way more interesting to me than than trying to push anything that would be something [kids] couldn’t look at.

Becky and Rick, I’m curious in seeing the finished product, were there any sets or particular moments that you saw and really thought, “Yes — this is what I imagined how this story would look”?

BECKY RIORDAN [Production designer] Dan Hennah really dived into the book and was able to bring it all out — Olympus, the underworld, Camp Half-Blood. It all feels so real.

RICK RIORDAN All of those are great, and there’s a water ride in one of the later episodes that is particularly well done. I think it’s vibrant and exciting — and not actually the way I envisioned it. If anything, it’s better, because it’s more vivid than I had imagined it to be.

Have you done any work on a potential second season yet?

STEINBERG Conversations. There are people having thoughts and spending some time imagining what something would look like. But nothing official.

RICK RIORDAN I think everybody’s just waiting to see how it does, and I think that will inform a lot of the conversations. The general hope among the whole team and the studio and [Disney+] is that we’re hoping that it’s a big hit and we’ll be able to do more.

Interviews edited and condensed.

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