American Gods Is a Bizarre, Dazzling Testify

Ian McShane as Mr. Wed, Ricky Whittle as Shadow Moon. Photo: James Dimmock/Starz

American Gods is 1 of the strangest serial ever to air on American boob tube. I say that with the authority of a critic who put Hannibal, the final series from American Gods co-producer Bryan Fuller, in the number-one spot on his meridian-ten listing two years running. Hannibal was an aggressively strange prove: bloody, perverse, and intellectually playful, and more interested in dreamlike atmosphere and imagery than in traditional storytelling. The influence of three Davids — Lynch, Fincher, and Cronenberg — was always apparent, and there were times, especially in flavor three, when Hannibal got every bit close to abstraction equally a series with a plot and characters could get. As a piece of storytelling, American Gods makes Hannibal wait like The Andy Griffith Testify.

The pilot starts with a prologue about a ring of Norse explorers making landfall in the Americas and suffering horribly, turning, in agony, to supernatural forces that seem to ignore them. The kickoff four episodes all have prologues similar this: little self-contained stories almost the relationship between humans and gods, or prayers and actions, that are thematically next to the main show but exactly a role of information technology. They're parables fastened to a show which itself has the feel of a parable.

The master serial takes its sweet time introducing its chief grapheme, Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle of The 100), a human being who gets released from prison at the same time that he learns his wife Laura (Emily Browning) has died in a car wreck. In time, Shadow Moon will autumn into the orbit of Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), a rascally con man who waxes philosophical near everything under the sun (a perfect role for McShane).

The testify then becomes a picaresque narrative, and at times a straight-upwards road pic, with Mr. Wednesday and Shadow Moon crisscrossing the Usa in a large, old American automobile, contacting various supernatural figures and having conversations with them. These include a trio of sisters with supernatural powers, separated by decades of age and led by Zorya Vechernyaya (90-year-sometime Cloris Leachman); Czernobog (Peter Stormare), Zorya'south roommate, a chain-smoking slaughterhouse worker who's nostalgic for the days when he used to kill livestock with a sledgehammer; Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber), a argumentative Irishman who challenges Shadow Moon to a fistfight; and a seductive adult female (Hannibal alum Gillian Anderson) who appears to Shadow from a bank of TVs in a superstore in black and white, in the guise of Lucille Ball.

I'm not sure how much else I want to tell you lot nearly the plot — and not because surprise is essential to American Gods. This series, which is adjusted by Fuller and Michael Dark-green (co-screenwriter of Logan) from Neil Gaiman'due south popular novel, volition probably accept a Game of Thrones–type viewership, mixing newbies with a large percentage of viewers who know everything that's going to happen already and are just watching to see how the show will dramatize things.

More to the signal, this does non strike me every bit a series that cares very much almost the "whoa!" factor. I haven't read Gaiman'south book and studiously avoided descriptions of it, considering I wanted to come up to the show with virgin optics and ears. As a issue, I didn't experience whatever of the revelations, which experience incidental and sly, equally anything other than accessories to the show's unique aesthetic, which is all almost what'due south happening in the moment. Fuller and Green and their directors — Hannibal veteran David Slade, in item — structure every episode so that it feels like a agglomeration of loosely connected short stories with recurring characters. Some have preexisting relationships with each other (like Mr. Wednesday and Mad Sweeney), while others just seem to mysteriously appear in the story, like cameo players. The almost striking of the latter is Orlando Jones'south dandyish Mr. Nancy, who's at the eye of the second episode'south prologue, speaking to slaves shackled in the belly of a ship in the 17th century. (Skip the next paragraph if yous don't desire to know what's really going on.)

Nosotros soon learn that we're witnessing the first stirrings of a war between the old gods — including Odin, Mr. Midweek's real identity, and Jesus, who shows up in a later episode in the guise of Jeremy Davies — and the new gods of technology, industry, and commerce. (Anderson'southward character, Media, is one of the new gods.) Mr. Wednesday's goal is to get the old gang back together to battle the new gods for control of the universe and reassert their supremacy. The premise of the novel is that gods actually do be, just but because people believe in them; considering belief in the quondam gods is on the wane — human thoughts existence preoccupied past applied science and electronic images — the onetime gods themselves are also on the wane.

Despite the momentous stakes, none of the characters on American Gods seem particularly obsessed with the fate of humankind and the universe, and the show doesn't seem obsessed with it, either. It treats the premise equally an excuse to serve upwards eccentric characters engaged in conversation or delivering very long, Tarantino-esque monologues. (Czernobog'due south clarification of the former days at the slaughter-house is a horrendous standout.) Every now and then, you get a burst of action that would seem unspeakably brutal if the show didn't abstract the claret and gore to the point where you experience like you're looking at a self-aware gallery exhibition. There's a moment in a quaternary-episode fight where a supernaturally powerful combatant kicks a man in the crotch and splits him in one-half vertically, so that his skull and spine fly upward into the air; the prototype is so ridiculous that I laughed at it, and I'chiliad adequately sure I was supposed to.

There are besides a number of extended sex scenes, one involving a genie and a salesman, that are much more emotionally intense than anything in Starz's Spartacus franchise. The show's aesthetic puts you in the moment — in the middle of the action, equally information technology were — rather than giving you a safe altitude by dicing the encounter into a montage of gorgeously toned bodies. When it comes to nudity, Fuller is an equal-opportunity showman: Yetide Badaki'due south sex goddess Bilquis goes full-frontal with a diverseness of partners (including Joel Murray, a.k.a. Mad Men'due south Freddy Rumsen, of all people), but the show is much more of a showcase for the male physique. In fact, it might be the starting time commercial drama to feature a penis (often erect) in every episode. Why that isn't a pledge to viewers in ads is beyond me.

Given Fuller's increasingly voluptuous and polymorphous sense of spectacle over the years, this seems all of a piece. There were scenes in Hannibal'south 2nd and third seasons that made claret, food, and unclothed bodies seem like alternating courses in the same never-ending feast. The close-ups of Hannibal Lecter'due south culinary creations, his handwork as a killer, and his rivals' gruesome gallery installations congenital of human being bodies were all lit and shot in ways that stylized them and made them seem similar parts of the same continuum. That's the instance here, too. Close-ups of poker chips, quarters, gold coins, blood, severed limbs, goulash, hardboiled eggs, dandelion stems, and rain-soaked globe are gorgeous on their own terms, just they feel like propositions also equally images — attempts to articulate a worldview that cannot be fully explained with words.

There'due south also the possibility that Fuller, Green, and company don't have anything to say, but are having a bully time proverb it anyhow. But as humans have to take a bound of faith to believe in the unseen and unverifiable, so, too, practise viewers of American Gods have to decide to believe that the bear witness is leading somewhere that volition justify the fourth dimension spent watching it and wondering what in the ever-loving hell is going on. There are points when the whole series seems to take its cues from Mr. Midweek, who tells Shadow, "You lot can't weave the stories that are necessary for belief unless you take a personality." Mr. Midweek is a god, but he is likewise a con human being.

After watching the first iv episodes, I can say that I don't love American Gods the way I loved Hannibal. This is partly considering Hannibal, for all its cool bloodletting and prankish humor, was a much warmer series — no doubt considering of the physically unconsummated dear between Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal and Hugh Dancy's Will Graham. The relationship between those two characters and the private cases they investigated served equally through lines connecting all the blowout scenes of horror, violence, and seduction. American Gods is deliberately disjointed, like tracks on an album. There are times when the show seems more interested in parsing ephemeral moments in the here-and-now than contemplating the large issues. The more beguiling moments involve bits of what might be called barroom philosophy, such every bit Shadow Moon saying that "all the all-time drinks take self-defining names," or Media lamenting people's increasing inability to concentrate on i thing at a time. "They hold a smaller screen in their laps or in the palm of their hands and then they don't get bored watching the big i," she says. Watch American Gods on a big screen, if possible, and plow the pocket-sized ones off.

American Gods Is a Bizarre, Dazzling Evidence