American Gods is widely considered one of Neil Gaiman’s best works. It’s also possibly one of the most difficult of the writer’s books to adapt. As anyone who has read it knows (don’t worry, no spoilers!), the story is incredibly expansive, and deals with a large number of truly unique characters. How does one adapt a fantasy book this, well… fantastical? Well, showrunners Bryan Fuller and Michael Green decided to approach the series as fan-fiction. Speaking to Screen Rant, Fuller and Green elaborated on this idea:
Fuller: “We started with the book. We sat down and had a conversation about, ‘What do you remember from the first read of the book, the things that stuck with you’. We both singled out Salim and the djinn and we were fascinated with the Laura character but wanted to do more with her – really it was lovely because we just got to fanboy out about the show and all those things that we liked we just made sure we were going to represent them as beautifully as we imagined when we read the book. It was really about being fan-fiction.”
Green: “It’s always that question of how do you give people who don’t know the book or don’t remember the book that experience we had reading it. We can only give them our experience of reading it, but that’s the advantage of being the one who’s allowed to adapt it. Someone else’s will be different and arguably better but ha-ha it’s ours.”
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This approach, as it turns out, is what led Neil Gaiman himself to feel more confident that these two men were the right people for the job. Here is what the writer had to say about his first meeting with Bryan Fuller:
“April 1st 2014, I flew to Toronto and met Bryan Fuller. We sat in the lobby of the Shangri-La hotel and just talked about American Gods. Bryan was great and also very, very human in that he was like, ‘I love American Gods, I bought it when it came out, I am a fan. I am a fan of yours, I am a fan of this book, I love it – I don’t know how we turn it into a TV series.’ And that, actually, I found weirdly more inspiring of confidence than I would a smart, slick person who’s saying, ‘OK well this is how we’re going to to do it.’ Because all I could tell was it resonated with Bryan just as much as it did for me and that he wanted to make it a real thing.”
“American Gods tells the story of Shadow Moon (Whittle) as he is released from prison after the death of his wife. Upon meeting the mysterious Mr. Wednesday, he becomes the enigmatic man’s bodyguard, but quickly learns of a secret war brewing between the Gods of old mythology and the New Gods of today: money, technology and media. As Shadow travels across the country with Mr. Wednesday, he learns his employer is one an old Norse god recruiting help for the coming war before they slowly die off.”
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American Gods will premiere on Starz on April 30th.
… You can find Jordan on Twitter (@JordJJones), and Facebook.
Originally published April 28, 2017. Updated November 30, 2022.
