Many deities in 4-D comic book
If you believe in gods, then they exist. That’s the highly simplified premise of “American Gods,” one gobsmacking series adapted from the classic fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman and premiering Sunday, April 30, on Starz. Truly, you have never seen anything like it.
More to the point, you may not get it for a while. In some cases, because of violence and very graphic sexuality, as well as sometimes opaque storytelling, you may not want to get it at all.
A man named Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is serving three years in prison but is released a few days early because of a family tragedy. On his way back home for the funeral, Shadow meets an oily con man in a trench coat who identifies himself as Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) and seems to know a lot about Shadow. Somehow, Mr. Wednesday manages to persuade Shadow to work for him, without getting too specific about the nature of the work. They go to a bar shaped like the inside of a crocodile’s mouth and meet Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber), a very tall leprechaun …
Here’s where I’d write, “and you get the picture,” but you haven’t seen the half of it by this point in the series.
There is a narrative thread, but for much of the way, we don’t fully know if characters like Mr. Wednesday, Mad Sweeney and others even stranger have any relationship to that thread and, if so, exactly what that relationship is.
Bilquis (Yetide Badaki) is a beautiful woman with an omnivorous sexual appetite, but woe betide anyone who falls for her considerable charms. Salim (Omid Abtahi) is a recent immigrant to the U.S. from an Islamic country who has found the streets of New York paved with disappointment, until he meets a mysterious cabdriver (Mousa Kraish) who takes him for a pleasurable ride. Zorya Vechernyaya (Cloris Leachman) is an elderly Russian woman who once lived in golden palaces and now tells fortunes for a meager living. She lives with her two sisters and Czernobog (Peter Stormare), who has fond memories of the old days when he was able to slaughter cattle with a huge sledgehammer instead of more humane methods. Mr. Nancy (Orlando Jones) is a fast-talking operator who gleefully tells a group of Africans bound in the hold of a sailing ship in the 17th century that they’re headed for a life as slaves in the American colo-