‘American Gods’ feels like more than a fantasy
Starz resurrects a 2001 novel that feels fresh today
Neil Gaiman didn’t mean to create the inspiration for 2017’s most political TV show almost two decades ago.
With American Gods, the fantasy novelist thought he was writing an “utterly uncontentious” story in the Clinton era about the immigrant experience, personified by ancient deities left behind when their faithful arrived here and abandoned them. But since then, Gaiman says, “the world went mad, and the stuff we wanted to say about the nature of America and the world suddenly became big and important.”
Starz’s eight-episode first season (premiering Sunday, 9 ET/PT) tackles immigration, as well as race, sexism, homophobia and gun control. And its 2001 source material is “more current now than it ever has been,” says star Ricky Whittle. “I’d love to (hassle) Neil Gaiman for his lottery numbers, because he must have a crystal ball.”
Whittle plays ex-con Shadow Moon, hired to help the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) round up the Old Gods, who have fallen from grace, for an upcoming conflict against the New Gods of technology and media that today’s society worships.
Insane situations confront them on their journey: Shadow is greeted by the New God of TV, Media (Gillian Anderson), in the electronics section of a big-box department store; plays a life-or-death game of checkers with the Slavic god Czernobog (Peter Stomare); and runs afoul of gold-spitting leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber) in a brutal, bloody bar brawl.
Yet it was the project’s allegories that most appealed to Crispin Glover, who plays the New Gods’ omniscient leader, Mr. World. “To see something as intelligent as this being put forward in a corporate manner is extremely healthy,” he says.
Executive producer Bryan Fuller first realized the show was “steering into political waters” while filming the opening of the second episode, in which Orlando Jones’ flamboyant trickster god Mr. Nancy tells prisoners on a slave ship in 1697 about the future of black people in America and “staring down the barrel of 300 years of subjugation, (racism) and heart disease.”
“You’re not really predisposed to be listening to any story during that particular moment in your life,” Jones says, laughing. “It’s so provocative and so unapologetic in the way the message is delivered, and that’s something people are not accustomed to seeing.”
Most of the changes from novel to series are “decorative,” Gaiman says: The Technical Boy (Bruce Langley), the New God of technology, written as a fat guy in a trenchcoat, is now a slim vaping hipster. “Technical Boys in 1999 were living in their moms’ basements and trying to figure out how to order a pizza through the Internet. (Now) they are abusing people in the back of Ubers or monetizing fake news,” says Gaiman, who’s planning on writing a
Gods sequel “if the world is still here and we haven’t all died of a completely unnecessary war.”
The one new character in the mythos: Vulcan (Corbin Bernsen), a deity of firearms who’s “an extrapolation of the god of the volcano to someone who could advocate holding a volcano in the palm of your hand,” Fuller says.
Gods is “wildly entertaining,” Jones says, but it has deeper messages, too:
“There’s a very loud audience out there screaming for something that means something, that is rooted in fact rather than alternative fact.”