American Gods: Series Discussion thread

I searched for a thread on the topic and was surprised that there wasn’t already one underway. I’ll spoiler tag anything from the book that hasn’t been revealed in the series.

I watched the first episode with my wife and several friends. Our kids were watching Netflix in the attic, but we let them come down for the Bilquis scene.

Some changes and compression to the way the story was told but they were all in service of the story. I wasn’t even upset that Audrey didn’t have red hair!

It feels like it has more of Fuller's DNA than Gaiman's. The Viking scene felt like Fuller filmed a bit from A Game of Thrones with a Pushing Daisies filter on the camera.

I like Ricky Whittle's Shadow much more than book Shadow. Book Shadow seemed like a cipher to me, the kind of empty nobody who only served to tell the reader about the world. He was so numb from the unreality of his wife's death that he accepted everything else without question. I think that was by design, but I don’t think that would work well on television, so it’s fine that Whittle is as expressive as he is.

His race is never specifically addressed in the book, but I always figured book Shadow as mixed race, but someone who could pass for white. (Or at least pass from something other an African American) I think Gaiman said once that he could see the Rock playing Shadow. Whittle is pretty unambiguously a black dude. (Usual disclaimers about race as a social construct apply.) I don’t think book Shadow was a black dude because in the course of several hundred pages his race is never an issue, and for POC in America, race is always an issue. You can’t have a book about America, gods or no without addressing that. But Fuller addresses this head on by framing the beating very specifically as a lynching and I think that works. It’s disquieting, but it’s supposed to be.

Wednesday was great, just an outstanding performance and I thought the effects on his glass eye were nicely understated. . There is a wrongness to one of his eyes. It really feels like something from the book. Sweeny was also good, and he’s in and out before he can wear out his welcome. Not sure if I like this interpretation of the Technical Boy or not, but if I wind up not liking it, it’s certainly not because of the actor’s performance.