One of the miracles of any good television program is that it really works. First, consider the countless people working in departments and disciplines needed to make a single episode happen; and then consider that they all have to do this anywhere between eight and 20 times a year, and that the result has to make sense to millions of people who cannot wait not to be impressed. There are many places to mess up! However, we hear of so few mistakes. That’s why it’s such a big story when something as big as American gods goes wrong.
The Starz drama was a special kind of disaster: it debuted with considerable acclaim only to fall apart between the first and second seasons, losing its high profile producers and several cast members. Between the end of the second season and the premiere of the last season, the show’s new manager fired Orlando Jones, whose fiery portrait of the cheating god Anansi was loved and one of the show’s brightest stars. (The allegations surrounding Jones’ resignation are worrisome.) That makes the third season more surprising: after all that chaos, it ended well.
The third season also does not remember what attracted many American gods first of all. The radical experimentation is over. There are no fiery monologues, mind-blowing sex scenes or powerful vignettes that evoke the immigrant’s experience and humanity’s relationship to faith. American gods is no longer interested in that kind of thing. Instead, he is concerned with rebuilding himself and doing the fascinating job of making a season that is in part a total overhaul and a direct continuation of the story that started in the first episode.
And so we are reintroduced to Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), a man who lives under a pseudonym after a fight with his employer, Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane). We are quickly reminded of the reason: Mr. Wednesday is not just an impossible boss. He is Odin, the Nordic Father of All – and also the IRL father of Shadow. Until recently, Shadow was driving on Wednesday across America to recruit the country’s forgotten gods, asking for his help in a war that was coming between them and the nation’s newcomers. (I should probably note here that in the world of American gods, worship is what makes them similar to the gods, so the forgotten ancient gods are mostly normal people with some mythical tricks.) These new gods represent our modern obsessions: new media, technology and so on. But Shadow ended it. He builds a home for himself in Lakeside, Wisconsin, an idyllic little town where the new and old gods will leave him alone.
Of course not, because Shadow has a role to play. The same is true of his late wife Laura (Emily Browning), who has been roaming the Earth as an undead revenant with the leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber, unfortunately missing this season out of some flashbacks), along with an eclectic cast of gods and those who know them.
This is all very superficial. The third season of American gods it is an attempt to restore the momentum lost in the second season, taking advantage of a note of grace in the novel that is slowly adapting – the protagonist’s stay in a small town – to rebuild himself. The program cannot present many new pieces because it is too busy trying to keep up with the old ones, and its tools are limited because it has committed itself to a relatively faithful adaptation of the novel on which it is based. Your destination is already defined, which means that in the meantime, the show has to be a little creative in how to get there.
The result is something not surprising to watch, but fascinating to think about. In our modern entertainment environment, rigidly managed and guided by IP, it is rare to see an ongoing production implode in a catastrophic way and then somehow manage to correct itself. In this sense, it is a good reminder that television is a singularly malleable and chaotic medium. (This despite the recent popularity of the prestigious format, which generally has shorter runs and planned endings that make it easier to forget that having a strict narrative plan is often a recipe for disaster on TV.)
The actors leave, new showrunners are brought in and the collaborative nature of the medium creates stories that are far removed from what was originally intended. Consider Breaking Bad, who initially planned to kill fan favorite character, Jesse Pinkman, and began his acclaimed final season with a shot that the writers didn’t know how they could justify.
American gods‘the third season’s effort to straighten up has undoubtedly left us with a smaller show – call it an unsurprising cable adaptation, as opposed to the exciting premium project it started on. But his chaotic journey is also worth remembering: despite all the promise of the bold new TV frontier where virtually any type of program can be made, this is still the domain of the ancient gods.