"Pulling from these epic tales that are filled with these big heroic adventures is something that can touch in a meaningful way. "These streaming platforms are giving everyone the ability to be more expansive and ambitious in the way that these stories are being told," Davis said. And children are no exception, added Ayo Davis, president of branded television at Disney. Read more: Disney's ambitious YA yarn 'Percy Jackson and the Olympians' never puts a foot wrongĮxecutives and creatives offered some insight as to what has triggered this resurgence.įor starters, the visual technology needed to convincingly translate these grandiose sagas to live action has "become so much more advanced and so much less expensive" in recent years, said Jabbar Raisani, an executive producer and director on Netflix's "Avatar: The Last Airbender." He also credits fantasy sensation "Game of Thrones" with awakening studios to TV's full potential as a storytelling medium.Īs TV has evolved, audiences' viewing habits and tastes have become more voracious and sophisticated. Live-action adaptations of world-building, tween-facing intellectual property such as "Percy Jackson," "Harry Potter" and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" were mostly reserved for the big screen.Īll three of those properties, which had previously been adapted into live-action feature films - to mixed results - are now getting a second life on the small screen more than a decade later. TV was where preteens got their live-action fix of lighthearted, multi-camera sitcoms such as "iCarly" and "Zoey 101" on Nickelodeon or "Lizzie McGuire" and "That's So Raven" on Disney Channel.
For decades, the tween demographic - too old for "Sesame Street" and "Bluey" (rated TV-Y) but not quite old enough for "Stranger Things" and the original "Gossip Girl" (rated TV-14) - has turned to books, animated series and their movie adaptations for larger-than-life storytelling designed specifically for them. "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" is among a growing number of epic, coming-of-age stories that are finally getting the live-action TV treatment in the streaming era. Read more: Walker Scobell and the creators of 'Percy Jackson' discuss the finale and hopes for Season 2 "I don't know that I'd ever quite seen anything like this" on TV, he said. When asked about live-action TV series that informed his approach to "Percy Jackson," however, Steinberg drew a blank. And that was sort of the unmeetable ambition that we set out for the show." It's not talking down to kids in any way. "That was a genre that I felt like I was frequently, constantly exposed to as a kid. "There were a lot," Steinberg said, rattling off titles including 1986's "Flight of the Navigator," 1985's "The Goonies" and 1982's "E.T. While co-creating the live-action TV adaptation of the magical children's book series "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" for Disney+, Jon Steinberg looked to several classic films starring plucky young heroes for inspiration. (Los Angeles Times illustration by Ross May photos by David Bukach / Disney, Robert Falconer / Netflix)
"Percy Jackson and the Olympians" on Disney+ and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" on Netflix are live-action TV adaptations of epic, coming-of-age stories.