Earlier today a huge piece of news was dropped regarding the upcoming Starz TV series adaptation of Neil Gaiman's dark fantasy classic American Gods. Gaiman himself joined the official Starz Facebook page to unveil a new poster for the show, and announce the series premiere date: April 30th. Yes, that's right: the American Gods series is only just over two months away. It was announced that the show will be carried on both Starz and Amazon Prime in America (through the added Starz membership you can add to your Prime account), and as a Prime exclusive elsewhere in the world.
The poster depicts the show's two central characters - our haunted ex-con hero, Shadow (Ricky Whittle) and the mysterious, otherworldly Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) - leaning against Wednesday's car, with a white buffalo (a symbol of spiritual/supernatural significance in Native American mythology) standing ominously nearby. The scene is set below a vintage-Americana neon sign of the show's title - but if you look a little closer, the way that some of the letters are burned out hides a question within the title: "Am I a god?"
The first season of American Gods will consist of ten episodes, although it is not yet clear whether the season will encompass the entire book, or if (more likely) the book will span a couple seasons. Several years ago, when there was a previous attempt to bring the novel to the small screen, Gaiman had said in an interview that his plan would be for the original novel to span more than one season. Hopefully that is still the plan, because while Gaiman has teased the coming of a second book for years, it has yet to materialize; hopefully he won't pull a George R.R. Martin, and will actually manage to finish book two before the TV series catches up. In the mean time, at least, there are two short stories in his various anthologies which check back in with Shadow in the years after the original novel.
The American Gods series is being produced by Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, with Gaiman contributing as a screenwriter. In addition to Whittle and McShane, it also stars Emily Browning, Peter Stormare, Crispin Glover, Gillian Anderon, Cloris Leachman, Dane Cook, Orlando Jones, and others. Were it not for Twin Peaks season three, this would easily be 2017's most exciting new show; as it is, it is at the very least a close second.
- Christopher S. Jordan