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American Gods

Will you believe in American Gods? There are two ways to uncover the answer, and fortunately neither involves accepting any deity as your personal lord and savior. The first hinges on how you felt about Hannibal, AG co-creator Bryan Fuller’s spectacularly disgusting, confrontationally beautiful (or is that the other way around?) adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels. The slow-motion gouts of computer-enhanced arterial spray, the gardens of the dead, the highly symbolic horned-animal imagery — it’s all here, as spectacular as ever under frequent Fuller collaborator David Slade’s sure directorial hand. (Even if Hannibal composer Brian Reitzell’s score works way too hard to sell it to you.)

The second hinges on whether you can stomach characters called Shadow Moon and Mad Sweeney fighting for the pleasure of Mr. Wednesday in a show called American Gods. For fans of Neil Gaiman, the comics writer and novelist from whose book Fuller and co-creator Michael Green adapted the show, this is the sort of modern-fairy-tale whimsy that makes him such a beloved and influential figure. (His work has inspired some comics writers’ entire careers. Hell, it’s inspired some comics publishers’ entire careers.) But if you’re allergic to Gaiman’s “it’s the Magic of Storytelling” schtick, or to the urban-fantasy vibe that this show shares with series like Preacher and True Blood (themselves based on books that are hard to imagine existing without Gaiman), you may be out of luck.

As a member of the latter camp, I’m happy to credit Ian McShane, whose charisma drives the action like Ben-Hur drove that chariot, with convincing me to give this thing a go. After a disappointing one-off appearance on the last season of Game of Thrones he’s back in the kind of series-defining role he occupied as Al Swearingen in Deadwood years ago. Fuller and Green smartly provide him with sort of obscenity-laden, mile-a-minute monologues he made famous in David Milch’s revisionist Western, which he delivers in his same mellifluous American accent. (By way of a for instance, here’s Wednesday offering the skeptical Shadow a drink: “I offer you the worm from my beak and you look at me like I fucked your mom?”) McShane plays his mischievous and mysterious con-man Mr. Wednesday (who’s pretty clearly Odin in human form, if you hadn’t guessed) like a Swearingen who’s done needing to look over his shoulder all the time and now lives high on the hog.

From there, however, the core cast gets shakier. As lead character Shadow Moon (ugh), the striking English actor Ricky Whittle does indeed have the combination of imposing size and intelligent eyes that Mr. Wednesday says drew him to the man. But in this episode alone, he starts out as an imprisoned convict, gets freed in the same moment as he learns his wife died, goes on a crazy road trip involving multiple run-ins with supernatural criminals — one of whom offers him a job, which he takes — and discovers his wife died while cheating on him with his best friend. It’s simply too much to get across in the same single hour we have to get introduced to the character. And even if you want to cite something like the Breaking Bad pilot as proof we can put a protagonist through major changes as an opening gambit, the writing does not afford Whittle the chance to show he’s up to the task the way Bryan Cranston was.

Elsewhere, The Wire’s Pablo Schreiber shows up as Mad Sweeney, a towering leprechaun (the height thing’s a stereotype, he too-cutely explains) who suffers from comparison to Cassidy, the Irish vampire played by Joe Gilgun in a near-identical part in Preacher’s near-identical plot. Yetide Badaki brings a frightening neediness to her role as Bilquis, a psychic-vampire love goddess who rejuvenates herself by growing to giant size during sex and inserting Freddie Rumsen from Mad Men into her vagina — like, all of him, not just the traditional vagina-accomodatable parts. The biggest problem thus far is Bruce Langley, who pouts, preens, and poses as the villainous Technical Boy, apparently Mr. Wednesday’s modern-age nemesis. The pleasure of seeing Fuller and Slade play with overtly digitized body-horror effects (turning his face and body into a troubling melange of pixels, giving him a Clockwork Orange–style gang of faceless android goons) can’t hide the fact that both the character and the performance are a ‘60s Batman villain without the saving grace of being deliberately two-dimensional. It’s hard to justify the loaded image of the lynching he orders against Shadow just to prove the bad-guy bonafides of this mustache-twirler.

For my money, the pilot’s most effective, and affecting, scene is also its most down to earth — literally, as in mere feet from a freshly filled-in grave. It comes courtesy of a leave-it-all-on-the-field performance from Betty Gilpin as Audrey, the widow of the friend with whom Shadow’s late wife was having an affair — news she delivers with an undecorous “She died with my husband’s cock in her mouth.” She shows up at the grave after both funerals, absolutely wrecked on Ativan and determined to exorcize the memory of their unfaithful spouses as brutally as possible by initiating a tryst with Shadow right then and there. “I want you to cum in my mouth—I’m gonna spit it on his grave,” she tells him, just moments before shouting “I am trying to get my dignity back here!” and breaking down into sobs. The grief, the sexuality, the anger—it’s all raw and real as hell. If Fuller and company can combine that emotional tone with the rich, ultraviolent surrealism of the imagery on a regular basis, the way they did on Hannibal, American Gods will be something worth worshipping.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.