American Gods: Review

American Gods

I hear way too much praise to this series and I don’t know why, I mean have I been watching the wrong American Gods? So I want to make my point on why this show can’t find its own ass even sitting on its hands.

I like Brian Fuller, the guy has, or had, a good eye for visuals, and the scenes on Hannibal were deep in every sense, I mean I liked to watch that series with the headphones so I could not miss a single sound and watched to like 30 cm of the screen so I could only watch the show and nothing else. But now we have American Gods, a show inspired on a not very good book (no matter what the people say) and now I see that every little criticism the show gets the fanboys jump to the rescue, but this show deserves to be called out when it fails that for me is at least 3 times per episode. And yes I am one of those people that read the book, but that only gives me more ammunition to destroy every scene piece by piece and even the foundation for it that this show destroys it by itself, so let’s begin with the discectomy.

Well the appeal of the book is that it goes by the back roads of USA and to the small towns where you can find the biggest ball of razor wire or other road attractions. And watching the show I can see that Brian Fuller has never stepped out of the Highway and hit a backroad in his life, he has never gone to a truckers dinner, or charged gas on a small town gas station, which is also supermarket, restaurant and has some things to make it more colourful. If you go and stay for a while in those places you’ll notice that everything looks slower, almost like time has stopped is that kind of peace in the air, the silence, is unique. But here you have always motion, always there is something happening and it makes no sense. Also everything should look like normal, like everyday life but with a little twist to make it look twice just to make sure you actually saw that. Like the alligator bar, in the show everything was alligators and it looked like a whole crew worked to create that set, while in the book this was a simple dinner/bar with 3 alligators as decoration, already dusty and forgotten but it was because the owner of the place liked them and though they bring luck. And that takes me to every single shot. Everything in this show looks staged and carefully detailed to the most minimal piece and that is so wrong is so many levels for this story, because the idea should be that this world is the world we live but happens things that you are sure just happened random but a person is telling you that they are doing it, and for a second you have that doubt, that not believing in your own mind. But the fact that everything looks a set takes you out, it doesn’t look like an everyday moment, looks like a play where everything is fake.

The main point of the show is that the old gods are fading because people are forgetting them and by this same reason the old gods want nothing with the new world, so when they said that Czernobog is using the bolt gun or Bilquis is using online dating is a complete denial of their premise. In the book Czernobog is retired from the slaughter house, he stopped working there when the bolt gun came, Bilquis was a prostitute, this was to show how low they fell, from being goods to that pathetic existence, but they look like they are doing OK in the show, a comfy life. Czernobog should have been in a small apartment that should look like the apartment of an old person, full of old furniture and ceramic figurines and almost no space to move because a whole life was camped into that little place. But in the show we have a big apartment that looks more like an abandoned luxury hotel than an apartment.

The show wastes a lot of time with pointless scenes, like the ones of the Ifrit or Bilquis, and gives you nothing for good scenes. I mean Bilquis is a character that has nothing to give for the story, the only thing is for sex scenes. The Ifrit could have been a better scene if you could have a moment to care for the guy who was there, I mean give the guy a proper introduction, show him taking all the samples into his briefcase let us hear how he talks with his family, before you strip him naked and have sex, I didn’t care for either of them in that scene. Bilquis should be a speck of dust a token of a story like the “Coming to America” bits but no, we need to see her naked every damned episode, why? The hell I know, she does not have a plot or adds any of value to the story. And now that I touched the Coming to America bits, there are enough stories of that in the book to keep you interested but they decided to make their own, which are really bad, I mean the story of Mr Nancy, makes no sense, if he could see the future he should have made peace with his own vanishing. Instead they could have used the story of the twins, or the one for Mad Sweeney, and the prehistoric era one made no sense, that story was about how with time and mixing cultures people forget the old gods and adopt new ones, not changing religions by force. And there are way more stories and could take a little more time and go visit Shadow’s dreams, that also is kind of wrong, because he starts on a cavern in the dark, making reference to he doesn’t know anything and then he starts to learn, also they set the Yggdrasil too soon.

Also, this show can’t find a genre that fits it, I mean, is it adventure, mystery, comedy? What is it? Because it doesn’t fit at any of those. It has no mystery, the adventures are dull and the comedy is worse than third grade jokes. I mean a Viking steps into the grass and 10,000 arrows get him at the same time, that is just dumb and ridiculous, then the battle among 4 Vikings an arm flew still holding a sword and kills another guy, was it supposed to be funny? Laura kicks a guy between the legs and the skeleton flies out of the body, that is a level of stupid even I can point out. Again the idea of the story was that do normal things and you’ll not be sure if the gods had something to do with it. The part of the Vikings on the book was that they hang a native and then they go back to their land, but years later when they came back their gods where already there in that new lands waiting for them, something simple something mundane, not all that flashy, artsy stuff. It is supposed to make you think it is normal.

The characters are way worse as every episode passes Shadow was supposed to be a good guy that did one bad thing once and ended in jail for that, and even in jail he learned the coin tricks just to stay out of trouble and pass time, also he reads a lot, a good guy so normal that his wife got a little bored of him, but here let’s make him a scammer and a low life. We should have seen a change in Laura, because being dead takes all the emotion of life, that is the point when she say that she can taste cigarettes anymore life has lost its taste, but here she is more alive than ever, and cheeky also super annoying, we lost the Zen master and we got some drunk high schooler, also if she does not believe in anything why is she judged by Anubis, that by the way looks way too good to have been forgotten, she should have disappeared or at least follow a grim reaper. Mr World should have been on the shadows at least till the end of the season, he is supposed to be the head of the men in black (not all are gods, if you believe in something it is real, THAT is the premise) so it was just the super under agency of the government. Media was meant to start like a dream that you don’t know if it really happened or you just have been way too much in that world and then move on to a more real thing. I liked that they followed Mad Sweeney after he lose the coin, but he got to it way to fast, I mean in the book he never gets close to it, I would like to see him in little scenes during the whole season trying to figure out what is happening and then trying to make his own luck, but no, it lasted like 40 minutes, before the “Comedy part” of Laura.

The show looks like it tries to be something it is not, like the kid in middle school that tries too hard to be supper mature but is still a kid. I mean the book I liked at the beginning, but it was like those dishes that you like the first bite but the more you eat the less you like, so I had to force myself to finish the book, but it took the book ¾ of it to happen, in the show happened on the first half of the first episode.

Don’t get me wrong there are things I like, like the intro, that one is nice, it could have been done better and loses the idea very fast, it remembers me when a friend tried to make an artistic/protest/social conscience video and it should have been 7 minutes long and we ended with 45 seconds. The intro is the same, like they had a good idea but it went away very fast.

The show is bad, it hides itself behind that mask of artistic and colour, but if you scratch the surface and really see it is a bad show that can’t even follow its own rules.