Road trip Mr Wednesday and Shadow face offįans of Gaiman’s book will be used to all this, and it’s hard not to admire the fearlessness with which Fuller and Green have kept to the novel’s madcap plotting and magpie interests. This, it seems, involves driving very slowly through middle America, stopping off at a succession of motels and backwoods shacks so that Whittle can have visions, the directors can drop in flashbacks and flash-forwards, and everyone can wonder what on earth or in heaven is going on.
Ian McShane’s character Mr Wednesday – actually the Norse Woden/Odin, although the series has yet to make this formally known – has a plan to take back control, and he wants an ex-con called Shadow (Ricky Whittle, once of the British teen soap “Hollyoaks”) to help. Meanwhile, the gods of technology, media and conspiracy rule a modern psychosphere of idle thumbs and idle minds. The old gods worshipped by America’s immigrants are still around, working con tricks and odd jobs and dreaming of the glorious past when people worshipped them. Viewers who come at it cold, or even those like me who haven’t seen their copy of the novel for a house-move or two, may wear a slightly hunted expression as episode three unveils new character after new character and the plot moves forward in a fog of cryptic mutters and significant looks.Ī few things are sort-of-clear so far. There’s great technique on display here – the fabulous tricks of cinematography and special effects, the wild character work, the scenery-chewing by Ian McShane – but this is a series that takes its time with storytelling to a near-unprecedented degree. What the hell is going on in “American Gods”? With scenes like this, perhaps it hardly matters.Įven so, it may matter a little. Next week’s show has an eastern European grandmother being spirited into the afterlife by a servant of the Egyptian god Anubis, and a sizzlingly erotic gay sex scene between an Omani salesman and a genie who drives a New York cab. The first two episodes showed us an ancient Ethiopian goddess using Tinder to seduce men and swallow them with her vagina, as well as a chain-smoking Russian devil with a bleeding sledgehammer, a buffalo with flaming eyes and Gillian Anderson as a winking goddess of the mass media. The only possible way to give it a chance would be to make a cultish, wondrous, sprawling and completely bonkers piece of television as well – which is very much the direction in which Brian Fuller and Michael Green’s adaptation seems to be heading. Adapting Neil Gaiman’s cultish, wondrous, sprawling and completely bonkers novel “American Gods” to the screen was always going to be a tall order.