After a year off the air and a significant amount of behind-the-scenes struggle, American Gods has returned with its second season. That in itself is good news. In today’s cancelation-happy television environment, it’s rare that a show as beautifully odd and daring as American Gods’ first season would survive losing two showrunners, two leading actors, and constant, well-publicized rewrites. So really, good on American Gods for making it to Season 2. Unfortunately, if the three episodes provided for review are anything to go on, the bulk of the show’s charm and magic was lost at some point in 2018. What remains is a tawdry and tedious shadow (pun not intended) of American Gods Season 1. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly Season 2 gets wrong. Watching the new episodes feels like a very good friend has been suddenly and noticeably replaced with that friend’s identical twin sibling. If anyone asked how one could detect the switch, it would be difficult to point out what exactly felt wrong. It’s just...not your friend. Top to bottom. And anyone who knows them would know. Part of what makes the opening acts of Season 2 feel so strange is the obvious fact that the climax of Season 1 has been negated by necessity — when Kristin Chenoweth’s character Ostara used her goddess powers to drain the fertility of America’s flora and farmland, it was meant to serve as the first overture of war between the old and new gods. Chenoweth quit the show after former showrunner Bryan Fuller left the project, which meant that Season 2 had to proceed without Ostara and the rest of her planned plotline. The first episode of Season 2 explains why Ostara is missing with a quick joke, but no quip could disguise the fact that Chenowith’s absence resets the plot significantly. Now, instead of proceeding towards war the old gods are depicted marshalling their forces and somehow still arguing over whether fighting the new gods is worth their time. That feeling of resetting the plot bleeds into other elements of Season 2. Mister World must again reign the impulsive Technical Boy in and send him on a goddess hunt to keep him out of the way. Mad Sweeney loses his luck, just as he did in Season 1, and is followed by a series of mishaps as he tries to get it back. Most frustratingly, Shadow Moon still has no idea what’s going on around him at any time, which has to get him on a list of the densest television characters ever written. Seriously, Shadow Moon witnessed a woman steal the entire season of spring, watched his boss’s face appear in the sky like Mufasa, and literally met Jesus, and still his reaction to being asked if he believes in gods is “eh, I don’t know.” This from the man who is sitting in a car with his wife’s reanimated dead body, a leprechaun who can pull gold from thin air, and a man who can talk to birds. Sir, are you sure? More sparks of the show’s great premise alight in its quieter moments. There are glimpses of American Gods’ former glory in some of Season 2’s grander moments. The carousel scene in the House on the Rock, pulled directly from a fan favorite passage in Gaiman’s book, is an expensive looking and fabulous adaptation of a transcendental experience, but nearly everything that surrounds it is bogged down with godly monologues and hasty verbal recaps of each character’s conflicts and powers. More sparks of the show’s great premise alight in its quieter moments. Omid Abtahi’s lovelorn cab driver Salim is still hopelessly in love with his fire-eyed Djinn, and their chemistry gives American Gods a romantic pairing to root for. Yetide Badaki is luminous as Bilquis; her subtle, sultry performance as a double agent is difficult to look away from. More than anything, American Gods Season 2 suffers from a need to overcontextualize everything that happens. Gods are real and they are at war. That’s it. That’s the show. The pointless theological rambling about the nature of belief fits better on the page than it does on the screen, where the dramatic irony of an audience knowing more than its characters is far less sustainable. It’s possible that American Gods could course correct in the rest of Season 2 and refocus on the beauty and power of its characters connection with Americana. There is an equal chance that the show’s believability was a direct product of Bryan Fuller’s involvement in the show. Sadly, if American Gods Season 2 continues in the vein of its first three episodes then that belief is as good as lost. And no god or monster could bring it back.<doc-sep>American Gods Close this dialog window Streaming Options “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport,” William Shakespeare wrote more than 400 years ago. And turns out, little has changed as American Gods returns for a long-awaited second season on Starz on Sunday, where the deities of old and new are up to their mischief, but this time in a fight for survival. The episode, titled “House on the Rock,” picks up a couple of hours after the events of episode 8 in season 1, where Wednesday (Ian McShane) reveals himself to be the great Norse god Odin to the confused protagonist Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) at the home of Easter (Kristin Chenoweth), where Wednesday faces off Media (Gillian Anderson) to recruit the centuries-old Easter goddess to his side. He succeeds as Easter casts a drought over the land. The new episode finds the rag-tag group of gods, humans, and Shadow’s undead corpse wife Laura all heading to the House on the Rock, one of the most eccentric attractions in America (check it out here), where Shadow and the deities ride a giant carousel that takes them into Wednesday’s mind, where he rallies them together for a war against the New Gods. Afterward, Shadow wakes up in a diner surrounded by the gods and wondering if what he experienced was real. As he grapples with his new reality, the diner comes under attack on orders from the nefarious entity Mr. World (Crispin Glover) — Shadow saves Laura and runs out to find the sniper, only to be abducted by the New Gods. In the diner, Wednesday finds Zorya Vechernyaya (Cloris Leachman) fatally shot, and the Old Gods come together to say goodbye to one of their own. American Gods, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman, has gone through quite a journey of its own to get to season 2, after the first season’s showrunners Bryan Fuller and Michael Green departed over reported creative differences and Jesse Alexander, the showrunner for season 2, left after completing the eight episodes. “I think Bryan and Michael’s vision was huge and was very much all about having Shadow at the center of something that just got bigger and bigger and brought on more gods,” Gaiman told EW. “One of the things Jesse wanted to do was get deeper into the gods and human characters that we have, so we spend more time with them in more places.” This means season 2 will focus more on Shadow and his backstory, which will be central to the second episode. Now that he is a believer in the gods, how that will impact his journey as Wednesday’s right-hand man? Gaiman, who co-wrote “House on the Rock” with Alexander, breaks down the episode for EW and what the second season has in store for the characters as war looms over them. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was it like to be at the actual House on the Rock and bring that scene that you had written so many years ago in the novel, to life on screen? NEIL GAIMAN: My part as a writer on that episode is fairly minimal but the most important thing that I brought to it, which I knew and Jesse didn’t because Jesse tried to get out there but a certain snowstorm meant he was unable to, was that I’ve been and spent time in the House on the Rock, so I understood the layout and knew what one was describing, whereas Jesse had seen photos but no photos can prepare you for the utter bugf–k weirdness of the House on the Rock. It’s what J.B.S. Haldane said about the universe, that it’s not only weirder than you imagine, it’s weirder than you can imagine. So filming there was astonishing, there’s something about actually looking at a bunch of actors who are allowed to ride the biggest carousel in the world that nobody is allowed to ride, but there they are, on it. Walking around, what I loved best was, because all of the actors are all intimately familiar with the novel, they were all fascinated by the House on the Rock and they read that sequence, but now they’re in the actual place and I asked them, “What do you think?” and they said, “We never thought it was this weird. We read the novel but here we are and it’s the weirdest place in the world.” You get to finally bring all the Old Gods together in this episode, so what was crafting that reunion like? It was enormously fun. That was, of course, where season 1 was meant to end, we were meant to get to the House on the Rock, but that was (when) it was meant to be a 10-episode opening season and it was meant to end at the House on the Rock, but for reasons, it never got there. So it was really fun that this is where we were heading all the way through season 1, all the gods were meant to come together and ride together and Shadow was meant to see this and Shadow is going to get Backstage and understand what’s going on — that Wednesday is Odin and he’s hustling the old gods. I also love that we have Bilquist (Yetide Badaki) in the story, and that’s a glorious thing that we have Yetide, who is an absolutely fabulous actor and who really makes Bilquist somebody that you care about. She’s hovering, she’s an old god working for new gods, but is she? That in itself is fascinating. Tell us more about Mama-ji (Sakina Jaffrey) and what role she’ll have in this season? Mama-ji, I love her, and I’ve explained to people when they ask, “Is she Kali?,” and I say “No, she’s not Kali, she’s an American incarnation.” She’s the American idea, she’s the Kali who has been brought to America and abandoned, and she’s scraping by. It’s very much worth remembering that she’s a warrior goddess and as things go on, she’s the goddess of death and endings and she’s immensely powerful, but she also is the voice of reason and sanity, she doesn’t believe Wednesday’s bulls–t, if it is bulls–t. You’ve mentioned before that we’re not getting to Lakeside this season, so where does everyone’s respective journeys take them to? We are heading to Cairo, Illinois, where Jacquel (Chris Obi) and Ibis (Demore Barnes) have a funeral home, it’s where Shadow gets to hide out for a little bit, it’s a place where he has his final confrontation with Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber) in the book. So we got to do a lot of that and more, because it isn’t just Shadow who’s heading to Cairo in the TV show, it’s also Bilquist, Mr. Nancy (Orlando Jones), and there are other forces as well, and the question of whether or not the New Gods know where Shadow is. We’re also going to take some side journeys. There’s a wonderful side journey that Wednesday takes with Shadow in episode 6, which partly exists in the present but partly in the 1930s, and it is Shadow being told by Wednesday about Wednesday’s burlesque house that he used to run and how Thor died, and you get to see the marvelous Rachel Talalay direct the episode mostly set in the 1930s as a look back at how American Gods would have worked then. And then episode 7 is Mad Sweeney’s episode again — in season 1, episode 7 was Mad Sweeney’s episode “A Prayer for Mad Sweeney” — and this season, we go further back. We get to learn the history of Mad Sweeney over the last several thousand years and how he began life as a god and wound up as a very tall leprechaun, and it’s getting much deeper into who Mad Sweeney is, what the darknesses are on his soul, what it was like to be a god and worshipped as a god in ancient Ireland and now be a joke. It also takes Laura and Mad Sweeney’s story to some interesting places. It’s been so fun to watch Laura (Emily Browning) and Sweeney together on screen. What have you been surprised to discover about your own characters through the TV show? What’s lovely about making television is that you have to be aware of what’s happening on the screen and good television is a weird process of positive feedback to what is happening on screen and being aware of what works and what doesn’t work. Pablo Schreiber was not originally available as Mad Sweeney so we went with another actor. The other actor lasted a day but had personal and family problems and had to leave, and I look back at that now and had that other actor — I will not obviously name — stayed in that role, I can’t imagine the Laura-Mad Sweeney plot would have happened, because he would have played a very different kind of Mad Sweeney, a much more down-heel, dirty, grungy character. The glory of Pablo’s mad Sweeney is just the moment that you watch Laura and Sweeney in the same television screen hating each other, loving each other, being this weird mad unity through time, and you go “Okay, I want to see more of you, you guys are amazing,” but that’s not something that any of us knew when we started, it wasn’t something I knew or Bryan and Michael knew, but it was something that we learned, and you have to be open to learning as you go. It feels like the show gets to work as a complementary companion piece to the book? I really like that, I’m very fond of the Technical Boy in the book, and in the book, it’s the best Technical Boy I could have written in the year 2000, at a time in the height of the tech bubble, and the coolest thing he could have done would have been figuring out how to get a pizza delivered to his mum’s basement where he lived without actually having to talk to a human being. It was 1999 and modems made screeching noises. The idea now is that the Technical Boy is going to be a Mark Zuckerberg, right now he’s going to be a lot more powerful than he was, when he was more or less a curiosity, because now where we give our attention is to these blocks of metal and plastic and glass that we carry around with us. I’m really interested to see what happens in season 2 and beyond with the New Media character (Kahyun Kim), I’m fascinated — Jesse brought her on and I’m interested in seeing where the new showrunners take her next season. Speaking of New Media, what about Gillian Anderson’s Media and Kristin Chenoweth’s Easter — will their characters be resumed with new faces? We all loved Gillian, she was amazing and she was only ever signed for one season. If Gillian wanted to come back as Media — we’re not saying New Media is Media anymore, because obviously, New Media isn’t. But the fascinating thing for me is when I wrote American Gods, if you go to a motel in the middle of the evening, you turned on the television because that was what you did for entertainment and there would be a black and white wasteland and color wasteland of ancient television that lived forever, shows like I Love Lucy and the Dick Van Dyke Show, it was part of everyone’s common cultural knowledge. If you talk to kids today, they don’t turn on the television, they don’t know who Lucy was or Dick Van Dyke or any of those people, it’s fallen out of that common cultural white knowledge, the stuff that you don’t ever notice yourself learning, it’s just there for you and that in itself I find completely fascinating.<doc-sep>
It’s been nearly two years since American Gods aired its Season 1 premiere. And while revolutions around the sun are mere grains of sand in a deity’s sandal… that’s a long time for us mortal types. My worry, going into the sophomore round: Would the Starz drama, which went through many behind-the-scenes changes while it was away, remain a faithful, interesting adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s beloved novel? The answer, at least as far as the premiere goes, is yes. The start of Season 2 has the vibrancy and quirkiness present in Season 1. The visuals are glorious. Ian McShane, especially, seems like he’s having the time of his life. And I’m in no way mad at the series’ made-for-TV add-ons, one of which reunites Salim with his Jinn. Read on for the highlights of the premiere, “House on the Rock.” FORE! | A man playing golf on a well-manicured course is just about to tee off when he’s mowed down by a limousine that careens around the green. It’s Technical Boy’s ride, and when he finally pulls into the Black Briar Country Club parking garage and opens the back door, we see that Mr. World is in back. “Duuuude, you’re a mess,” Tech Boy says, and he’s not wrong: Mr. World’s face is all pixelated after that run-in at Easter’s. Tech Boy helps Mr. World gain entry to a secret facility underneath the garage, but that’s as far as TB is allowed to go: Mr. World is spoiling for a fight with the Old Gods, and “I can’t sell war without my best salesman,” he says. “Find Media.” Popular on TVLine WELCOME TO HOUSE ON THE ROCK | Meanwhile, Wednesday, Shadow, Laura and Mad Sweeney drive through Wisconsin in Wednesday’s car. They’re headed to The House on the Rock, a sprawling and deeply weird tourist attraction that contains a multitude of oddities as well as a giant, indoor carousel. (The place is seriously cracked, in the best way, and I can’t do it justice here. If you want more info, here you go.) But before Wednesday’s gang even arrives, Bilquis is sashaying through House on the Rock after hours. She dispenses with a security guard in her fashion, then runs into The Jinn — who’s also wearing a guard’s uniform — and confesses that she wasn’t formally invited. A moment later, he sees… “Salim. What the f—k are you doing here?” The Jinn says, seemingly angry. “Do you boys need a minute?” Bilquis asks. (Heh.) As it turns out, The Jinn is worried for the former salesman. “This is not a safe place, not tonight,” he says. “I do not grant wishes,” Salim gently reminds him. Outside, Mr. Nancy suddenly appears at the gate and helps Shadow & Co. gain entrance; as they walk in, he announces that Easter won’t attend the meeting because she’s mad at Wednesday for running over her bunnies like a “rabbit racist.” Laura hangs back to talk to Wednesday, and it becomes clear that he knows that she knows he put her death into motion. Also? He doesn’t seem to care. “You don’t have to be roadkill forever. I’m sure we can come to an arrangement,” he purrs. She’s not interested. Meanwhile, Shadow is irked that Mad and Laura have been hanging out so much, and it shows. ROUND AND ROUND | About a dozen Old Gods await Wednesday on the carousel, which you’re not supposed to ride, but dude. GODS. Mad, Laura and Salim aren’t allowed on, so they stand there and watch as Nancy, Wednesday and Shadow get a fortune from a machine like the one in Big. Shadow’s seems ominous and mentions “like father, like son,” which is something you’ll probably want to file away for later. Eventually, the gods and Shadow get on the carousel, which is as magical as we’ve been told. After a few turns, the thing starts to spin like a whirligig, eventually ripping apart and flinging its riders into the cosmos. I know that sounds like an exaggeration. It is not. Shadow wakes up face-down on a beach, and Bilquis is standing nearby, arrayed in queenly finery. She explains that they’re kinda in Wednesday’s head, aka “backstage,” which explains why their surroundings look like proto-Scandanavia. He follows her inside a building, where she begins to glow in otherworldly fashion.