Percy Jackson - Shorter or Fewer Episodes, Please

Ephraim Belnap

Let me just preface this by saying that I have no inside information, and a lot of trust in Rick Riordan as a writer, so if I'm totally wrong about this, I will be more than happy about that. 

That said, I still think it's worth saying. 

According to Rick Riordan on his blog, Season 1 of Percy Jackson is going to be 8 episodes, with the pilot supposedly around an hour. The 8-episode order suggests one thing. The pilot's length suggests another. It's hard to tell right now when they're still in the early stages of production and have only recently gotten their editor working. But it seems possible that episodes after the pilot will either be roughly half an hour like The Mandalorian, or roughly forty-five minutes like Stranger Things. Both are high-value streaming shows with eight episodes per season. It's no exaggeration to say that based on the source material, the Percy Jackson show could be as big as both of these. And it's being managed and run by veteran showrunners and directors, alongside the original creator who's spent twenty years honing his craft. 

But the show is still essentially being handled by an amateur, and showrunners used to the forty-five minute cable TV format. And from a screenwriting, directing, and action perspective, looking at the first Percy Jackson book and later books ... I think the show either needs to follow the half-hour format or abbreviate itself to six episodes in future installments. 

It's hard to explain why, and most of it is based on "isms" I've heard from veterans in the industry. But I think it tracks. Percy Jackson is frankly, so good that it only fits to a very specific and exciting format. And it does so for several reasons. 

One, every single book is motivated by a ticking clock. Typically the deadline of a winter or summer solstice, the day of which being when the threat or conflict must be neutralized. This trope automatically builds excitement and tension, making the audience hyper-conscious of time's passage. But if screentime is too stretched out - 45-50 minutes per eight episodes, for example - this tension will deflate. It won't become a way to keep the audience on edge so much as a calendar they resignedly decided to start keeping track of. 

Second, Percy Jackson is an action series, pure and simple. Not more than thirty pages go by without someone or something trying to harm someone else. If you look at even the first book, the least action-heavy book by far, there are twelve fight scenes, where Party A is endangered by Party B's actions. Action is time-intensive. Three minutes of fight can be as dense as nine minutes of dialogue, with corresponding density in shooting. But it can also be vital storytelling, where the hearts of the characters and conflicts are brought out and dramatized. Length doesn't correspond to quality here. And considering both the constant level of action, and the even higher levels of action in sequel seasons, you'd be better off shortening the runtime so you can both have a lower action quota per episode, and so you can spend more time training and rehearsing the actors for it. 

Third, Percy Jackson fits the action-adventure genre despite being a novel. It's about a lot of things. Parental abandonment, developmental disorders (I myself am on the autism spectrum), bullying, prophecy, the nature of good and evil, what ancient myths tell us about ourselves. But it's at its core a very simple action-adventure story. Characters are quippy, problems are usually solved by violence, and each moment of relaxation is honestly a moment to let the character motivations build up before the next setpiece happens. That's action-adventure. And it thrives on economic storytelling. Things directly relating to the action or characters or plot and nothing else. Forty-five minutes for eight episodes, is frankly too much time. 

If Percy Jackson were a drama, it could get away with longer episodes, because maybe characters would need to talk for twenty minutes at a time to work through their feelings. If it were a sitcom, you could make it work by adding more jokes when an episode isn't long enough. And if it were a procedural crime show, you could add extra steps in the process of finding clues and contacts. But Percy Jackson is none of those things! And the fact of the matter is that all three of those were written specifically to fit in the forty-five minute, an-hour-with-ads cable TV format! Not because that was the best way to tell the story! 

The medium of the time dictated the format, not the storytelling demands. And Percy Jackson should feel it has the freedom to tell the story in the way that best suits the material. And that material, based on what I've just said here, seems better suited to a shorter-yet-more-intense set of runtimes. Think of The Office, or Parks & Recreation, or The Good Place. Good, long-form, high-quality storytelling doesn't have to run a certain amount of minutes. What matters is the quality of the material within those minutes! 

So, as the production team continues forward with this season and further ones, it's my sincere hope that they'll consider the pros and cons of shorter or fewer episodes. Best of luck!