Olympus, Season 1

First off, this show is lower budget and makes extensive use of green screen sets. For the most part I think they worked well but some people won't like them at all. One of my first impressions was that some of the visuals were too much, but they are eventually explained in the course of the season. Olympus reminds me of the TV shows Spartacus and Atlantis, with a bit of the feel of the movie Immortals. It sucked me in a bit more quickly than Spartacus, and the gods are more of an actual thing than in Atlantis, and it isn't quite as creepy as Immortals. Like Atlantis and Immortals it doesn't follow any particular myth but utilizes some bits and pieces here and there to give it the feel of something that could have inspired some of those myths. I was surprised when they did choose to reference something that had happened in a particular myth and used it as the motivation of one of the characters. Most of the acting is very good. There are a couple of cringe worthy characters. One of which may actually be how the character is written more so than how the character is performed. Story wise, I was sucked in to the point where I marathoned a big portion of it to see how it ends. I liked the ending but marathoning might have cost the show a rating star from me because it seemed to drag along in trying to get to the end of the story while also moving too fast (in one incidence) for me to readily believe in some character developments. For the most part I really liked the main characters and thought they all had a good amount of depth. Even the one character that I think everyone is meant to dislike, ocassionally shows that he has some depth. The iTunes version appears to be entirely TV-14 rated. I saw a TV-MA version of the first episode but the rest I saw were all TV-14. Besides the use of green screen sets this is where the show reminds me of Spartacus a bit. There's a fair amount of violence, sometimes in the 300/Spartacus super slow-mo blood spattering camera panning style. Although, I think that was mostly in the first episode. Not that later episodes don't have any violence I just think it isn't as graphic. Also, in the Spartacus vein there is sex and nudity, although mostly of the TV-14 variety (maybe see a bare backside), but what reminds me of Immortals and to some extent Spartacus the most is the scenes that sneak up on you and you find yourself doing a double take because what happened or what is happening is a bit messed up. None of them are as graphic as something in a TV-MA or R rated show/movie but I found them a bit amusing for being rather messed up in a "I can't believe they did/said that", keeping me watching. There are quite a few incidences of characters being tied up and interogated, as well as multiple Greek mythology style incidents of people chosing to do things with people that are kind of wrong, and/or finding out after the fact that something they did was really wrong. I think the overall story is good and entertaining. It might have benefitted from a bigger budget and more, or maybe fewer episodes. I like how it mixes the gods of Greek mythology with hints of modern science, and a smidge of Judeo-Christian theology/mythology.