Miguel Antonio Concepcion

Where do I even start. PJO is a series I hold near and dear to my heart; since I first heard of the series from the show (entertainingly bad live-action, but in my opinion a fairly good standalone YA fantasy flick - even after reading the books!) I was so excited to hear that Rick himself was going to work on his own adapatation in series format. After his critiques of the original duology, I was expecting an accurate portrayal of everything Percy - as he had promised to deliver on. Though the casting initially had fans waving red flags, what really mattered in the end was the portrayal of the core character. Though I wouldn’t discount that the choices for the final casting still had an effect on some fans who fully expected the closest 1:1 adaptation of at the very least the main cast of characters. Adaptations are meant to bring life to the original source material, rekindle the love of old fans, and bring in new fans - but it had already failed to do so from the start and continued to do so as the rest of the show went on. Every episode has bad pacing, as I’m writing this, Ep. 5 was the only one that felt like the writers took their time, and even then it lacked so much of what made the books so charming. PJO is meant to be fun, and having the series be so boring is criminal. We’re supposed to be on a grand adventure where nothing is as we thought it was, and yet the show just feels so unreasonably dark, without all the charm. It’s in this weird spot where it tries to be child-friendly but adult enough to be taken seriously at the same time. The acting is passable but at times just feel like they were directly read off a script. Facial expressions are always the same too - the actor for Percy always looking confused and not in a good way - in fact I’d probably say it’s more like just staring into the distance with a curled brow. Annabeth is constantly annoyed even at times when it wouldn’t make sense for her to be; and Grover always with a slight smile coupled with a monotone voice. At this point I think I’d rather just rapid-fire the rest of the show’s problems: removing plenty story beats and characterization moments, criminally boring fight scenes that were adapted poorly (and I don’t mean they deviated from the book, instead that I’m disappointed that they never bothered to make take the opportunity to to at least make these fights more exciting on the big screen), monologues that overstay their welcome, stiff acting from the kids, overexplaining concepts rather than showing them off; and sometimes underexplaining concepts for newer fans. Overall, 5/10 show for me if I were a non-fan, but a 3/10 as a fan. I’ll give it a 1-star rating though since I don’t believe that the show should continue on without properly addressing their lack of effort and bad directing. I love PJO but I will not settle for this S1 as the best adaptation we’ll ever get…