Neil Gaiman’s AMERICAN GODS to be adapted into television series
Starz is officially set to go forward with the series adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s multi-dieties novel, American Gods. It’s been something that has been floating around in recent years, and they’ve decided to go for it, with Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) and Michael Green (Heroes) as showrunners.
Gaiman will have a hand in the series as well as executive producer, and he seems excited about this newest venture.
“I am thrilled, scared, delighted, nervous and a ball of glorious anticipation. The team that is going to bring the world of ‘American Gods’ to the screen has been assembled like the master criminals in a caper movie: I’m relieved and confident that my baby is in good hands. Now we finally move to the exciting business that fans have been doing for the last dozen years: casting our Shadow, our Wednesday, our Laura,” Gaiman said.
And Starz is letting the fans in on the casting process. Well, at least a little bit. They’ll be looking into what actors fans will suggest for the main character, Shadow Moon, on social forums with #CastingShadow as the hashtag.
Fuller and Green have also expressed their excitement over this project in their official statement:
“Almost 15 years ago, Neil Gaiman filled a toy box with gods and magic, and we are thrilled to finally crack it open and play. We’re grateful to have Starz above us and FremantleMedia at our backs as we appease the gods, American or otherwise.”
Fuller went on to say this at the ATX Television Festival in Austin, TX:
“I was raised Catholic, (Michael Green) was raised Jewish, so we both have fascination with these great mythological stories, so we were talking over lunch one day about how we both want to work together again on something, then ‘American Gods’ came up … There’s so much of that book that is a story of Shadow and Wednesday, and our approach is almost anthological — but we wouldn’t tell the network ‘anthological’ — in that we get to see Bilquis, who we see eat a man with her vagina in one chapter of the book and is never seen or heard from again. She’s a main character. We get to tell stories that start 5,000 years ago in ancient Babylonia and then see how she came to the modern day.”
With popular books being made ever more into major network and cable television series as well as movies, it’s exciting to see that showrunners seem to be taking the source material more seriously than ever (although there’s still always the allowance to stray from said material every so often, and still having it create awesome drama, i.e. Game of Thrones.)
With this addition, as well as the slow but ongoing process of making Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novel into a feature film (to be directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), we can’t wait to see what Starz will bring us. And what Starz has done lately, especially with another novel-based show, Outlander, we’re pretty sure it’ll be quite good.
About American Gods:
Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she’s been killed in a terrible accident.
Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible.
He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same…
Source: Variety