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American Gods

Credits

Cast

Network

Reviewer

Paul Asay

TV Series Review

“You gotta serve somebody,” Bob Dylan once sang. The deities on Starz’s American Gods are vying for that service. And they’re not messing around.

Turns out, the gods of yore have hit hard times as of late, what with the world growing more secular and so few folks having the inclination to set up sacrificial altars in their closets. Americans bow before different masters now. Media. Drugs. The internet. These are the gods ascendant, the new kids on Elysium’s block. And they’re not interested in sharing their worshiping masses with a bunch of has-beens from history class.

But the Old Gods still have a few tricks up their sleeves. In fact one of them is orchestrating a climactic showdown between the old and the new—a winner-take-all contest that’ll make the whole Zeus vs. Chronos conflict look like a game of Twister.

Altared States

Shadow Moon stands at the center of this murky melee. He never intended to get mixed up with the gods, but he didn’t have much going on when the mysterious Mr. Wednesday offered him a job. See, he had just gotten out of prison, but his wife and best friend were both killed in a traffic accident … in a seriously compromised position that revealed the two were having an affair. The job Shadow’s best friend had promised him died that day, too. So while Wednesday doesn’t seem to be the most honorable of men, at least the money’s good and the work is relatively light.

Well, except when Shadow’s attacked by quasi-spiritual assailants, that is.

See, Wednesday’s a god—Woden, or Odin, to be precise, from the old Norse myths. He’s up to something, and the New Gods—led by the glowering Mr. World and the young and seriously punkish Technical Boy—know it. They want to find out what Shadow knows. And if Shadow doesn’t tell them anything, maybe they’ll just kill him.

But Shadow has more on his mind than just putting up with these divine hijinks. Because thanks to a special, magic coin given to him by a seriously angry leprechaun, it turns out his dead wife, Laura, isn’t so dead after all. Well, she is, technically. The lady’s a fly magnet. Still, she’s remarkably ambulatory for a dead woman, and still carries a torch for her favorite widower.

Baal Out of Here!

Let’s get this out of the way now and perhaps save you from the rest of this review: American Gods is the one of the worst, most content-laden shows on television.

Even apart from the show’s syncretistic take on spirituality, it achieves this dubious distinction early and often. American Gods features incredibly explicit sex scenes. Its special effects team clearly bought fake blood by the liquid ton. The language is blushingly, crushingly foul. It’s almost as if someone from Starz’ executive wing looked at Game of Thrones and American Horror Story and said, “Nope, not extreme enough. Let’s double it. Triple it if we can.”

Stir the show’s murky spirituality into the mix, and American Gods becomes just that much more troubling.

It’s not that the idea of gods losing their mystical mojo from lack of worship is exactly new terrain. In fact, I think I remember a Star Trek episode (“Who Mourns for Adonais?”) dedicated to that very narrative. And if the show sequestered itself to just old Norse and Egyptian mythological figures—along with making its sly, cogent statements on the new “gods” we’ve built for ourselves—I could at least give American Gods a little credit for making some kind of statement about what we Americans worship.

But the opening credit sequence—festooned with Buddhas, Jewish menorahs and, yes, Christian crosses—makes it clear that this series has more ambition than that. Christianity comes into the mix at times. The show plucks the pagan elements from Christian holidays out at others (such as when Easter made a bunny-festooned appearance in Season 1). Five different actors have played the show’s version of Jesus: “Jesus Prime,” “Black Jesus,” “Mexican Jesus,” “Hippie Jesus” and “Asian Jesus.” “Gods are real if you believe in them,” Mr. Wednesday tells Shadow as he stares at Jesus Prime in a Season 1 episode. It suggests the showrunners put just about as much stock in Christianity as they do its angry leprechauns: That is, not much.

American Gods is based on an award-winning book by Neil Gaiman. And if the show follows the novel, viewers are in for a twisty, crazy and incredibly bumpy ride. My advice? Don’t even get on. This show, like the gods it gives us, is not worth our time.

Episode Reviews

March 10, 2019: “The House on the Rock”

Shadow, Wednesday, the leprechaun Mad Sweeney and Shadow’s dead wife, Laura, are on a road trip to The House on the Rock, a Wisconsin tourist attraction, to meet with a bevy of Old Gods and to get Wednesday’s war against the New Gods geared up. Meanwhile, New Gods Mr. World and Technical Boy are searching for one of their own gone rogue, a deity named Media.

The meeting in Wisconsin ends in a mass shooting: A sniper apparently hired by the New Gods fires into a diner crowded with Old ones. We see part of someone’s face gorily blown off. Another man’s arm is torn off by a bullet. We see other people get shot and die, too. (Laura’s hit as well, but since she’s already dead, she shrugs off the injury with an exasperated sigh.) A golfer is run over by a careening limousine as the sound of chanting monks plays in the background.

We see plenty of gods in various guises, including their more dramatic “true” forms (complete with flame-filled eyes and culture-appropriate costumes). One demigod, a Jinn, is apparently involved in a same-sex relationship with a mortal man (Salim), who crashes the meeting. Bilquis, a temptress of a goddess, kisses Laura and tells Shadow that if she was holding the meeting in her own mind (as this meeting is held in Wednesday’s), it’d include silk beds “in which to make love.” (She may also sexually consume a guard off-camera.) We hear someone reminisce about gods and demigods having sex with mermaids.

Bilquis (who wears a low-cut outfit) is associated with the Queen of Sheba, and Wednesday talks about how the latter “defeated King Solomon” with her wit. We hear a reference to a Season 1 party held by the pagan goddess Easter, and how Wednesday ran over a bunch of bunnies there “like some kind of rabbit racist.” Most of the gods plunk coins in an old mechanical fortune-teller machine and take stock of the predictions thence spit out. We hear gods and goddesses from various religions swap legends and war stories, and they lament how no one worships them anymore. Czernobog, a Slavic god of darkness, fondly recalls the scent of the sacrifices made to him.

Gods and mortals drink beer, whiskey and wine. A few of them smoke—perhaps cigarettes, perhaps marijuana joints. We see cigarette butts dot a map. Characters say the f-word more than 25 times. We also hear three uses of the s-word, along with “a—” and the British profanity “bloody.”

American Gods: Apr. 30, 2017 “The Bone Orchard”

The mysterious Shadow Moon is released from prison just in time for his wife’s funeral. But on the way he meets Mr. Wednesday, who offers him a job.

We must begin this episode summary with the much-discussed sex scene, featuring a middle-aged man and the goddess Bilquis (who is, incidentally, the biblical Queen of Sheba in the original book). As the two have noisy sex (we see most of their bodies and breast nudity), Bilquis demands the man’s actual worship. He complies, telling her that he’ll give everything he has to her, including his life. She accepts his offer, which culminates in an unbelievably bizarre, graphic act—one that’s too explicit to describe here.

We learn that Shadow’s wife, Laura, died while performing oral sex on his best friend in a car. Dialogue about the incident graphically describes what happened to his anatomy when another car struck theirs. There’s another extremely detailed verbal reference to oral sex, as well as mention of someone urinating on a grave.

The show opens with a flashback to when Vikings discovered the New World. Their arrival turns bloody in a hurry: One man is shot full of literally hundreds of arrows, looking more like a porcupine than a person when he falls over dead. The Vikings want to leave, but the winds are not cooperative. So they make sacrifices to the “All-father” (a wooden idol of which is staked in the ground). First, they blind each other in one eye (each) with a red-hot knife. Then they burn someone alive on a pyre (we see the man, engulfed in flames, writhe in agony). Finally, they do battle with each other to impress their war god: Skulls are split open in fountains of blood. People are literally cut in two. We see the arm of a man fly up in the air, still holding a sword, which then skewers someone else’s throat.

People-like beings are literally torn asunder by some spiritual force. Blood falls like rain. A man is beaten by several assailants to the point of death, then strung up in a tree by his neck. (He seems to die, but the rope breaks and he falls to the ground, injured but alive.) A punch sends blood pouring from a man’s mouth. Shadow and a nasty (and surprisingly tall) leprechaun get into a fight at a bar, leading to a great many cuts and bruises. We see a dead armadillo on the side of the road.

Characters imbibe mead and various mixed drinks. Someone gets seriously drunk. Another character uses in a urinal. We hear the c-word once, the f-word about 30 times and the s-word seven times. We also hear four pairings of God’s name with “d–n,” one misuse of Jesus’ name, and instances of “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h–“, “d–k” and “p-ss.”

We meet several “gods” and mythological beings. People speculate on the afterlife and the nature of faith. A funeral takes place in a Catholic church. We see a crude, very vulgar phrase scrawled in a bathroom.

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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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