One of the wonders of any good television show is that it does not even work. First look at the countless people working across departments and disciplines needed to make a single episode happen; and then think that they should all do it between twenty and eight times a year, and that the result should make sense to millions of people who cannot do it. wait not to be impressed. There are lots of places to waste! And yet we hear of so few mistakes. That’s why it’s a pretty big story as something as big as American Gods walk crooked.
The Starz drama was a special kind of disaster: it had its first and second seasons in pieces for the first time, losing its high-profile films and various cast. Between the final finale of the second season and the premiere of the latest season, the new management of the program fired Orlando Jones, whose fiery rendition of the deceiving god Anansi was beloved and one of the brightest stars of the program. (Allegations surrounding Jones’ dismissal are alarming.) That makes the third season more surprising: after all the chaos, it has turned out perfectly well.
Season 3 also does not look like many people have dressed American Gods in the first place. The radical experimentation is gone. There are no fiery monologues, mind-bending sex scenes or powerful vignettes that evoke the immigrant experience and humanity’s relationship with faith. American Gods no longer interested in that kind of thing. Instead, it’s about rebuilding itself and doing the fascinating job of making a season with equal parts a total do-over and a simple continuation of the story that began in the first episode.
And so we are again introduced to Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), a man who lives under an alias after dating his employer, Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane) dropped out. We are quickly reminded of this: mr. Wednesday is not just some impossible boss. He is Odin, the Norwegian All-Father – and also Shadow’s IRL father. Until recently, Shadow drove through America to recruit the forgotten gods of the country and enlisted their help in an upcoming war between them and the nations of the country. (I should probably note here that in the world of American Gods, worship is what makes them divine, so the forgotten old gods are mostly normal people with some mythical tricks.) These new gods represent our modern obsessions: new media, technology, and so on. But Shadow is done with it. He makes a home for himself in Lakeside, Wisconsin, an idyllic little town where gods new and old will hopefully leave him in hell.
Of course they do not, because Shadow has a role. So does his dead wife Laura (Emily Browning), who along with the gnome Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber lost the earth as a deadly income), along with an eclectic cast of the gods and those who know them.
All of this is pretty perfect. The third season of American Gods is an attempt to restore lost momentum from the second season, using a grace in the novel that slowly adapts it – his protagonist’s stay in a small town – to rebuild himself. The series cannot introduce many new pieces because it is too busy to account for the old pieces, and the instruments are limited because it is dedicated to a reliable processing of the novel on which it is based. Its destination is already set, which means the show has to get a little creative in the meantime in how it gets there.
The result is something that is overwhelming to look at, but fascinating to think about. In our modern, well-managed, IP-driven entertainment environment, it is rare for a continuous production to explode in such a catastrophic way and then somehow succeed in getting it right. In this it is a good reminder that television is a unique malleable and chaotic medium. (This is despite the recent popularity of the prestige format, which often has shorter runs and planned endings, making it easy to forget that a strict storytelling plan is often a recipe for disaster in TV.)
Actors leave, new forerunners are introduced and the collaborative nature of the medium provides stories that deviate far from the original intention. Consider it Break bad, who initially planned to kill Jesse Pinkman, a fan-favorite character, and began his award-winning final season with a shot that the writers did not know how to justify.
American GodsThe third season’s effort to make amends has undoubtedly left us with a lesser performance – call it the overwhelming cable adaptation, as opposed to the exciting premium project it started. But its chaotic journey is also worth it: despite all the promises of Peak TV’s daring new frontier where just about any kind of program can be made, it’s still the domain of the ancient gods.