Season 1 - 8 episodes (2017)
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Created by: Bryan Fuller, Michael Green
Based on: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Starring: Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Emily Browning, Crispin Glover, Pablo Schreiber, Gillian Anderson, Cloris Leachman, Peter Stormare, Orlando Jones, Betty Gilpin
Rated: TV-MA
Watch the trailer
Plot
A recently released ex-convict named Shadow Moon meets a mysterious man who calls himself "Wednesday" and who knows more than he first seems about Shadow's life and past.
Verdict
I really enjoyed this season. It provides intriguing ideas, frequent dark humor, and the question of what's building. I couldn't wait to see the next episode. This takes the concepts of faith and religion and anthropomorphizes them into old and new gods against each other. It's such a strange and intriguing concept in this weird world.
Watch It.
Review
This has a great style and mood. It's dark in look and content, but it's this strange fantasy that incorporates gods and concepts as people. The question of what's going on and what will happen drives the season.
Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is an ex-con just out of prison. He encounters Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), after one heck of a day, who offers him a job. From the start we know Wednesday isn't normal. He has a preternatural sense of things. Wednesday is one of the old gods of religion, beliefs, and prayers. He's battling with the new gods of media, influence, and fame. All of this happens in the pilot, and it's a great hook.
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| Ian McShane, Ricky Whittle play Mr. Wednesday, Shadow Moon |
Many episodes include an opening vignette outside of the show in time and place. They help add to the world, providing scale and scope. This world is bigger than Shadow Moon and Wednesday, but these diatribes that sometimes feel like a distraction often connect to the main plot. Even if I wasn't sure how everything fits together, the first season is engrossing and I couldn't wait to see what happens next.
Episode four delves into Shadow's wife Laura's (Emily Browning) backstory. I wasn't sure about this episode and whether I needed to see how Shadow ended up in prison, but this ties Laura's story into Shadow's impressively. That generates more questions in addition to what is Wednesday's interest in Shadow.
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| Pablo Schreiber, Emily Browning play Mad Sweeney, Laura Moon |
Episode five mixes media and broadens the scope of the series as we see how religion and faith extend through time. This episode also has Shadow relay everything that's happened to him in this season and it sounds ridiculous even to the viewer. There's a leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pable Schreiber). This episode breaks the season wide open. We've danced around what's happening, but gods are real and a war is coming. These beliefs and gods have spanned generations The old gods are older, tired. The new gods are young and powerful because their user base is larger. Power and seemingly conception is tied to belief.
This is an ingenious idea to anthropomorphize concepts of religion, belief, and faith. The war isn't about the people that believe in these concepts, but the concepts themselves. The old religions and beliefs have given way to the new religion of media, society, and technology. While the final episode reveals who Wednesday is, the episode instead becomes a catalyst for what could happen in the next season.
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