Percy Jackson and the Potter Implications
If you’re a 90’s or early aughts kid and you haven’t seen Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians streaming series, what are you even doing? The original quintet of books, released from 2005 to 2009, was right up there with the original Potter series in terms of young-adult real-world fantasy, and the adaptation is stellar. While certainly targeted toward a younger audience, it captures the humor and suspense of the novels well enough that it’s a fun watch regardless.
But it also has important context: as an adaptation of a young-adult real-world fantasy series with emphasis on both epic scale and individual characters, the show is an essential precursor to the upcoming Harry Potter TV series. And from what Percy Jackson has done so far, some things are already evident — both good things and bad.
The good
Here’s the first thing you notice as the Percy Jackson adaptation kicks off: it is faithful to the books to an almost shocking extent.
The Potter films are faithful to the books, but in a different way: they capture the essence, and don’t stray too far from the main plot lines. But the Percy Jackson series is a different animal: scene for scene, and sometimes even word for word, what’s on TV nearly matches the book.
This is exactly what the Potter TV show needs to do: it needs to accurately show all the scenes for which the movies didn’t have time. We need to see Dudley throwing his cereal at the wall and Uncle Vernon walking across the street to buy himself a bun from the bakery.
One looming question for the Harry Potter TV show is how it will differentiate itself from the eight-film series, and here again, Percy Jackson offers positive signs. There were two Percy Jackson movies (they were terrible), but once the adaptation starts, it’s easy to just forget about them and watch the show as its own thing. The Potter TV show badly needs this. Of course, it’s not clear how easy it will be to replicate the Percy Jackson adaptation’s success, but it’s a good sign that the phenomenon is at least possible.
Finally, we get another good sign: the child actors can completely handle their roles, and the show doesn’t see any kind of drop-off in quality with the move from cinema to TV. This wasn’t something I was overly worried about — the Potter show should have plenty of money and resources to put out a high-quality product — but again, it’s good to see it happen in the real world.
The bad
But here’s what gives me pause.
The Percy Jackson series can be as long as it wants. The book it’s based on isn’t that long (416 pages). The author himself is one of the main writers.
And even with all that, the show can’t completely capture the books.
It can take every scene on the page and put it on the screen, but that’s just checking off a box. And as faithfully as the Percy Jackson series is executed, it still can’t quite capture the most important thing: the author’s voice.
It’s obvious why this is so important: just like the Percy Jackson series, the Potter series is incredibly voice-heavy, starting with the first sentence. How can you capture “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of No. 4, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much” on screen? Well, you show them in their house being very normal — but that can’t capture the care that goes into each written word, and the satisfaction of reading them in sequence, in exactly the tone that they were written.
Scenes with context, that don’t depend entirely on dialogue, that are based on text the reader uses to visualize the events for themself — those are incredibly difficult to portray on screen. But if the Potter series wants to really, fully succeed, it will have to pull that off.
I’m by no means saying that the Potter TV show can’t succeed where Percy Jackson has fallen short. But capturing the original series’ voice and tone will be absolutely essential for the success of the show, and for a TV series that should be similar, it makes me nervous that Percy Jackson wasn’t quite up to that task.
