Critics worship 'American Gods'

Starz officially enters the book-to-TV-fantasy arena with American Gods, based on Neil Gaiman's 2001 novel, on April 30. Starring Ricky Whittle and Ian McShane, the story subverts religious mythology in a twisted, modern world.

Critics viewed the first few episodes and, so far, praise is high for the show, which should please the book's rabid fan base.

Those wild visuals

Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair:

In the premiere, a Viking crew, stranded on Northern American shores, endeavors to find a sacrifice violent and bloody enough to please their war god, Odin, in the hopes he will bless them with winds to fill their sails. What follows is a sequence that will look awfully familiar to Game of Thrones fans: grimy, bearded men in furs proceed to violently attack one another. What will look less familiar, is the artful way gallons of Viking blood fountain into the air. This is, after all, a show from the visually distinctive Bryan Fuller who took the art of cannibal cuisine to mouth-wateringly new style heights in Hannibal.

Dan Jolin, Empire Online

American Gods feels like a stylistic sequel to Hannibal, with the first two episodes directed by one-time Hannibal regular David Slade...Here the dream sequences are more epic and portentous, involving visions of petrified forests carpeted with human skeletons and ceilinged by the vast, cold cosmos. The blood flows just as prettily as it did in Hannibal, but even more freely, whether gushing from bisected Dark Age warriors or dripping from an ancient slaughterhouse hammer. Desire, too, can be just as deadly. One jaw-dropping scene in the opening episode, as erotic as it is terrifying, sees Mad Men's Joel Murray enjoying the best sex of his life with mysterious seductress Bilquis (Yetide Badaki) when she hungrily swallows him whole, in a manner that would give even David Cronenberg nightmares. Very sexy nightmares, but nightmares nonetheless.

Page versus screen

Danette Chavez, The A.V. Club:

In addition to establishing the core dynamic between Shadow and Wednesday, American Gods sets about recreating many key moments from the novel, including reimagining Bilquis’ worship scene as the dating app hookup to end all dating-app hookups. But though Fuller and Green have mostly remained faithful to their source material, they’ve followed Gaiman’s example in breathing new life into iconic figures. Aside from a more proactive Shadow, they’ve also changed the face of the Technical Boy from online troll to the kind of social media personality who’s taking over the internet. He’s as petulant and vicious as ever—he’s just moved out of his mom’s basement.

Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly:

While American Gods has the right stuff to be a The Great American Dark Fantasy Television Novel, I’m not ready to rule yet on whether the show can be TV’s next great big saga serial. Fuller and co-showrunner Green appear to be restricting themselves to the confines of Gaiman’s book; the first season will reportedly cover just the first third. The adaptation is largely faithful. There are tweaks, elaborations, and rearrangements, all blessed by Gaiman, who has participated as an exec producer. Still, time will tell if the show can stretch the material, or if the material lends itself well to the kind of entertainment some viewers (or Starz) wants it to be.

Political themes

Danette Chavez, The A.V. Club:

American Gods immediately starts tearing up the track, with an opening sequence so awash in Viking blood, it would appease Odin himself, not to mention acolytes of Hannibal and Logan (the latter of which Green wrote). The torturous tribute is not just a reminder of the brutal realities of exploration. It’s inspired by one of the many vignettes that made up the novel’s detours, which serve a similar purpose here, breaking up the stretches of road that Mr. Wednesday (McShane) and Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) drive across. But they rightly get the full treatment from directors (and Hannibal alums) David Slade, who helmed the first three episodes, and Guillermo Navarro. These trips back in time are, after all, the kind of immigration stories Gaiman and now the showrunners have been keen on telling—we have to see just what’s going into the melting pot.

Though its external scope covers oceans and millennia, when American Gods turns its focus inward, it must cross a distance even less fathomable. What we’re watching play out aren’t just the spoils of war or its incitement. It’s the battle for identity, being waged by individuals and a country. When Wednesday wryly observes that America remains a nation without one cohesive identity, it’s very much the Old World in him talking. Odin may be the god of knowledge and wisdom, but he can’t quite see that the swirl of cultures make up this country’s ever-changing face. Shadow represents the frequently invoked melting pot, and a counterpoint to Wednesday’s assertion. As conveniently topical as it might seem, the showrunners are once again just following the author’s example, as Gaiman always intended to tell a pro-immigration story.

Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair:

Even in the show’s weaker moments, American Gods is taking viewers on an unforgettable tour of an increasingly divided country. When, at one point in the season, Shadow shouts his heartbroken despair into the echoing chasm of an empty American landscape, viewers can feel, the way Gaiman did, how this wild unpredictable frontier welcomed so many lost travelers.

...And that celebration of otherness—of the varied and enigmatic cultures that make up America—is the very beating heart of American Gods. In its first season, the show will follow desperate Mexicans fleeing north, middle-eastern men struggling to find their place, and, in one explosive sequence, a slave uprising on the way to America. (Unlike Ben Carson, we won’t call that last scene an immigrant tale.) Orlando Jones, the star of the dramatic slave ship revolt, discussed recently how the show’s political themes informed his performance as the trickster African god Mr. Nancy.

Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly:

Shadow’s arrangement with Wednesday has a deal-with-the-devil vibe to it, which illuminates the queasy subtext of their relationship: he’s playing black manservant to a white patriarch. To be clear,  American Gods doesn’t ask us to read the text through a lens of race, but it’s there to be interpreted, take it or leave it. In fact, most of the time, I see the Shadow-Wednesday relationship as a nightmare neo-noir frog-scorpion bromance, with Shadow the savvy cynic seduced by a more-savvy homme fatale who might not have his best interests at heart.