american gods
Behind the scenes of your next TV obsession.
If all you know of Bryan Fuller is that he’s the tasty brain behind NBC’s Hannibal, which was cancelled after three delectable seasons because its exquisite aesthetic proved too rich for mass consumption, then he is, in person, not what you might expect. Loping into a London hotel room with a big grin and bigger spectacles that seem to have teleported onto his face from the ’80s, his rangy 6ft 2in frame, foppish hair and riotous sweater – birds, bees, stars, lightning bolts – are a world away from Hannibal’s controlled, forensic milieu.
A self-confessed nerd whose talent and passion for all things fantastical saw him enjoy a meteoric rise in TV ( Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek:
Voyager, Pushing Daisies, Heroes), this geek has now inherited, if not the Earth, then something pretty seismic: Neil Gaiman’s 2001 tome American Gods.
Gaiman’s Hugo and Nebula Awardwinning novel sees titans of ancient mythology clash with the New Gods (Media, Technical Boy and so on) against an Americana backdrop. Our way into this almighty dust-up is Shadow Moon (played in the show by The 100’ s Ricky Whittle), who’s released from jail to attend his wife’s funeral and finds himself in the employ of the mysterious Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane).
“I actually took my first edition copy of American Gods for Neil to sign,” grins Fuller of his initial meet with Gaiman. “One of the first things he said was, ‘Ugh, I’ve been signing books for the last two days,’ and I kind of shoved my bag back under my chair!” Must love Gods “We’d been talking to showrunners, and I flew to Toronto and met Bryan,” recalls Gaiman a couple of weeks later, on the phone from Australia. “There was the glint of madness in his eye. He said, ‘I love American Gods. I’ve loved it for a decade. I have no idea how to turn it into television…’”
They worked it out together, travelling in numerous directions before hitting on the magic formula. “The show looks at what the characters are doing when the book is not looking at them,” explains Gaiman. “Probably my favourite episode has basically nothing that I wrote in it. It’s the life story of Laura (Emily Browning), Shadow’s wife. You meet her a week or so before Shadow meets her. You follow their courtship. You get to find out what happens when he goes to prison. You get to find out what happens when [ drops a huge spoiler]. It’s a really wellthought out, well-constructed episode of cool stuff that I never wrote but is all implicit in the book.”
“It was about,” says Fuller, “how do we balance out the story so a) it’s not a sausage party with two guys in a car, and b) I want to understand that character – she’s so much more interesting than just the unfaithful wife.”
And that’s just the start of the efforts that went into deepening characters and widening the scope. “We don’t contain ourselves to the modern-day storyline,” Fuller continues. “We are on slave ships crossing the Atlantic; we are 5,000 years ago in an ancient Babylonian sex temple; we are 20,000 years ago, exploring the first belief system…”
The deities today
Such digressions mean fans of the book will be frequently wrong-footed, and there will be enough material for several seasons. This kind of detailed inquiry allows, as Fuller puts it, for more “celebration of diversity, of cultures, ethnicities and religious perspectives” – Shadow, for example, represents the black experience in modern America, only for paradigm shifts to bring new angles in a bid to afford a 360-degree perspective. And while these themes of understanding and acceptance are present in the source material, they’re now more relevant than ever.
“There was a dramatic difference from watching the episodes before Trump’s election, and then the next day watching the episodes,” muses Fuller, while Gaiman adds: “Having so many powerful women, and the simple fact that we’re acknowledging that America is a country made by immigrants, is somehow weird and risky in this age, when it wasn’t when I was writing it.”
He pauses, draws in a long breath. “I’m both incredibly proud and I kind of worry. It remains to be seen if the president will be tweeting angrily about how appalling American Gods is.” But won’t it be good publicity if he does? “Everything is good publicity until somebody gets shot. There are a lot of crazy people out there.”
With its warring deities and inventive FX, American Gods is undoubtedly more mainstream than Hannibal. It is not, however, Marvel-like entertainment. “Clash Of The Titans meets The Grifters, with men being eaten by vaginas” is how Fuller enticingly describes it. Gaiman, meanwhile, promises, “Something that exists between Twin
Peaks and Breaking Bad, only there are gods, death is not necessarily the end, and weird-as-shit things happen.” Consider us sold.
ETA | 1 May / American Gods launches exclusively on Prime Video next month.
‘it’s something between twin peaks and breaking bad’ neil gaiman