American Gods traveled a strange and circuitous route to get from the pages of cultishly adored author Neil Gaiman’s book to the Starz television series that just wrapped its first season Sunday night. Attempt after attempt to bring its world of clashing gods and weird American backroads to the screen failed. When even Neil Gaiman’s own attempt to adapt his book fell apart, it began to seem that this was one tome that simply would and could not make the jump to live action.
In came dancing Bryan Fuller, fresh off the cancellation of the cultishly adored Hannibal. Along with fellow executive producer Michael Green and the family of talent in front of and behind the camera that they assembled over the course of Hannibal’s run, Fuller brought the gods, Old and New, to life.
Did he do a good job?
Yes.
Was it everything that fans of American Gods were hoping for?
Welllllllllllllllllll…that’s where things get complicated.
A quick rundown of the barebones:
American Gods centers around recently released convict Shadow Moon (played by Ricky Whittle, best known before this for taking his shirt off on The 100), whose wife Laura (Emily Browning, Sucker Punch) died in an accident only days before Shadow was about to be released. Travelling home for her funeral, Shadow ends up accepting a job from a conman who calls himself Mr. Wednesday (Ian Hot Rod McShane [a lot of people probably would have gone with Deadwood here, but fuck you Hot Rod is awesome).
Wednesday, it turns out, is actually an incarnation of an ancient pagan god (I’ll resist spelling out exactly which one in case you decide to watch this show/read this book, but it’s treated as a fairly open mystery). Through Wednesday, Shadow discovers an entire world of lost gods, brought to America by the legends and myths of immigrants, only to be abandoned and forgotten as times change and culture homogenize. The old gods have been pushed to the very fringes of the world, while a race of new gods (Media, Technology, Globalization) take power. Wednesday aims to reclaim his and his brethren’s former glory by spurring them to a final and glorious battle, a plan that is gradually revealed to the audience slowly.
Very. Slowly.
I’m going to have a ton of very nice things to say about American Gods in the very immediate future, so let’s talk about the core issue before proceeding: American Gods, at least in its first season, was so scattered, and revealed its plot and heart in such a roundabout and obfuscated fashion, that I can only assume that anyone who didn’t come to the show with a working knowledge of these characters and this work must have been utterly confused.
Part of that is clearly intentional. Shadow Moon is our point man in this adventure and Shadow Moon is very, very confused by everything happening around him. It’s only fitting that we are as well. And the first season of American Gods was built around Shadow’s journey from blinkered doubt to wide-eyed belief, and on paper I can understand why Fuller and Green opted to keep audiences in the dark about their show’s true shape until their lead character was ready to accept it.
And it’s not like Fuller hasn’t taken this approach before. Hannibal notoriously took relatively stock procedural plots (and some of the most well-known/ripped off source material in modern fiction) and attacked them as abstract, impressionistic art. But the operating word there is ‘procedural’. Episodes of Hannibal were underlaid by a clear, coherent narrative structure on top of which the creative team could embellish every gonzo flourish their hearts desired. Once Hannibal abandoned that procedural structure, the show grew shaggier and began to feel shapeless (albeit still entrancing).
American Gods starts pitched at that later-Hannibal level of shapeless. For the most part, episodes didn’t feel like episodes, but rather like hour long collections of scenes.
These scenes were magnificent, without fail. American Gods is perhaps one of the most technically impressive things I have ever seen on television. Directors like David Slade and Vincenzo Natali painted with a hyper-stylized brush, crafting a world that feels close to ours but heightened just enough that when things crossed over into the dream-logic of gods, the audience wouldn’t flinch. Each scene, each shot, carried with it a palpable sense of delight and invention, like you could hear Fuller cackling just off camera with glee at what he was getting to put on screen. From the hills of Ireland to the sprawling deserts of the afterlife to a cosmic starfield inside a Babylonian sex goddess (long story. A long, very naked story), American Gods found new ways to stun week after week.
And yet…and still…and yet after watching eight hours of the show, I still feel like this was a sample, not a full meal, a tease without payoff.
For all the technical acumen that went into making the show, the only reason this entire mad enterprise held up at all was the cast, a murderer’s row of talent all swinging, hard, for the outfield and connecting more often than not. Whittle held down the center of the show admirably, finding the nuances and grace notes that made Shadow a compelling figure even if he stayed in a reactive state throughout.
(Sidenote: Whittle’s achievement is doubly impressive given what an absolute drip Shadow Moon is as a character. I love Neil Gaiman with all my heart, but American Gods has always ranked low in his works for me, in large part because the lead character is so deeply boring. With Fuller and Green writing him, and Whittle inhabiting the role, TV-Shadow is an altogether livelier and more engaging creation.)
It helped that Whittle struck terrific chemistry with the eternally-wonderful McShane, and so scene for scene with the pair was a delight, especially as they came face-to-face with an onslaught of hilarious/horrifying/entrancing beings of mystic nature.
Let’s see, there was Bruce Langley as Technical Boy, Orlando Jones as Anansi the Spider, Crispin Glover as Crispin Glover, Yetide Badaki as the aforementioned sex goddess, Pablo Schreiber as a hulking, surly leprechaun, Kristin Chenoweth as Easter, Jeremy Davies as a Jesus Christ, Dane Cook, Peter Stormare as a Slavic god of death, Gillian Anderson as a bevy of identities assumed by new god Media (including David Bowie and Lucille Ball), along with Browning hanging around the margins of the story as a reanimated Laura.
Browning was the revelation of this season, and the two episodes with her front and center (“Git Gone” and “A Prayer for Mad Sweeney”) were head and shoulders above everything else this year. “Git Gone” deviated probably furthest off book from anything else this season, while “Mad Sweeney” was a largely-slavish retelling of one of the “Coming to America” short stories sprinkled throughout the text. But while they took opposing tactics to adaption, the episodes were unified in that they drilled down, focused, and told contained, episodic stories. You were allowed to take your time and relish in what Browning was doing as a performer (along with supporting turns by Whittle in “Gone” and Schreiber in “Sweeney”) without having to cut away to some other stretch of disconnected story.
With pretty much every other character and performance, there simply wasn’t enough to go around. Glover, for instance, is listed as a regular in the opening credits but he only appeared once all season (I guess twice if you count his CG visage in the finale [I don’t]). Most of the others fared little better, appearing for a taste and a tease and then disappearing.
A lot of these problems will almost be certainly mitigated with the arrival of a second, longer season (btw, American Gods was picked up for a second, longer season, weeks ago). And, in fairness to Fuller and Green and their team, it sounds like the production of American Gods was incredibly complex and expensive, with the intended finale having to be scuppered and moved to the beginning of season two after money and time ran out. But, still, you would hope to arrive at the end of eight hours of storytelling feeling some sense of, I don’t know, completeness? Accomplishment? And I didn’t feel that with Sunday’s finale, not with our main characters remaining entirely offscreen for the first twenty minutes, and then being shunted off to the side so that guest stars can chew scenery and monologue and have dance numbers. American Gods, for all its wonders, proved to be a show without a center.
And yet…it has such wonders. Not only with its visual extravagance (and I feel the need to reiterate that on a visual level this show was an absolute fucking marvel. Just ravishing.), but with the spirituality that coursed through it. With sequences like the passionate love affair between Salim (Omid Abtahi) and the Jinn (Mousa Kraish) who gave him a ride in his cab, or Anubis (Chris Obi) appearing in a New York apartment to gently escort a woman from one life to the next, American Gods reached for (and attained) a cosmic beauty unlike anything on television before. And with setpieces like Jones’ Anansi addressing a cargo hold filled with slaves, or a Latino incarnation of Christ (Ernesto Reyes) being struck down at the border, the show proved to be one of the most bracing, clear-eyed examinations of a country that has been wrestling with its darkest and lightest aspects since the moment of its inception.
So maybe American Gods didn’t quite connect all the dots to become a pantheon-level show in its first season.
But I still believe.