Here’s something you don’t expect on a random Friday in the doldrums of August: a charming, perfect, too-short teaser for a new series you’ll have to wait four months to watch. Entire generations of kids have now grown up on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, which got two, er, not terribly well-loved movie adaptations over a decade ago.
Now, Disney+ is giving the books the series treatment, and the first few glimpses we get of Percy (Walker Scobell), Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries), and Grover (Aryan Simhadri) are a delight.
This teaser for Percy Jackson and the Olympians offers just enough to tantalize anyone who knows the gist of the stories: Young Percy, who has long struggled with the expectations of “normal” life, learns that in fact he’s the son of Poseidon (Toby Stephens), and that all the Greek gods and the stories about them are true. That’s what his mom, Sally (Virginia Kull), briefly tells him in voice-over here.
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In the first novel (and first season of the show), The Lightning Thief, Percy finds out the truth of his world and his demigod existence, makes new friends at Camp Half-Blood, and immediately gets caught up in a whole bunch of shenanigans involving Zeus’s stolen lightning bolt. Many, many gods and monsters make appearances along the way, and they’re played by Glynn Turman (Chiron), Adam Copeland (Ares), Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hermes), Jessica Parker Kennedy (Medusa), Megan Mullally (Alecto), Lance Reddick (Zeus), Jason Mantzoukas (Dionysus), and Jay Duplass (Hades).
(Let us just take a moment to note, probably not for the last time, the delicious fact of Toby Stephens—Black Sails’ Captain Flint—going from sailing on the ocean to being the god of it. Also, here’s a lovely appreciation of the late Lance Reddick from Rick Riordan.)
The show’s first two episodes were written by Riordan with Black Sails co-creator Jon Steinberg; Steinberg and Dan Shotz (a producer on Black Sails) are the showrunners.
Join the quest on Disney+ on December 20th.
This post was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
