Not sure about this.
- The casting better be good
- I don’t think the religious right will like it
- How can you turn a book that size into 6 seasons- will it include Anansi Boys? The Shadow novellas? New material?
What do you think?
Wow. Yet another famous fantasy novel that… I never heard of.
This is going to be another one of those things where the faithfulness (and perhaps even the quality) of the adaptation will be irrelevant to me. I already know it won’t be able to touch the book in my mind, so I’m just excited to see how some of the truly excellent imagery from the book will translate to the screen. I especially want to meet Czernobog and his three sisters.
Or in other words, squeeeeeeeee!
So what ever happened to the HBO “Under the Dome” series?
I think Joel Grey would be a good Hinzelmann…other than that, I just don’t know who they would cast.
Shadow and Mr Wednesday could so easily go wrong.
But if they did it right it could be very cool.
Sounds awesome! I’ve long ago gotten over the fear of bad adaptations somehow eclipsing the original in my mind or in our culture. Each work stands on its own for me.
In this case though, there’s nothing to worry about anyway. Neil Gaiman knows how to write for television. His recent Doctor Who episode was outstanding. Perhaps more importantly, HBO knows how to produce a series. They have an incredible track record with original series. They clearly give the creative types the freedom (and the budget!) they need to tell the stories they want to tell. If they do include Anansi Boys (and I rather hope they do) there won’t be any of the “Can’t Fat Charlie be white?” bullshit that Hollywood tried.
So you’ve got great source material, one of the best television writers ever (who also created the source material) and the television studio with the best production record in history. Who wouldn’t be excited about this?
If Gaiman is part of the creative team then I trust it will be done right. He knows how to work visually, and how to work for TV specifically, and he knows that adaptations are not direct translations.
I am hoping that they don’t do a faithful adaptation, but rather do something new with characters set in that universe.
I don’t know how to feel about this. I either love Gaiman’s books or I absolutely hate them. American Gods happens to be one I love. If they do as good a job adapting it as Game of Thrones, it should be fantastic. But if they don’t…
But six seasons, really? I could see two, maybe three with Anansi Boys. Sounds like this wouldn’t be even close to a faithful adaptation.
I think you’d just take some of the characters and the basic concept, and then make your own plots. Honestly I wasn’t that big a fan of the book (I wish Gaiman would go back to writing comics or radio dramas), but it does lend itself pretty well to an open-ended TV series, as the characters and world-building are more memorable then the plot itself.
Eh, he’s kinda hit and miss. I just finished watching Beowulf as based on Gaiman’s screenplay, and it was pretty bad (and largely because of the dialogue, which I assume was Gaiman’s contribution). And I gave up on Neverwear pretty quickly.
I think six seasons is just to give himself a ballpark number with leeway. The book could hardly last that long if they made one day one episode - except for the long wait in the icy village, hardly much time passes at all. And there really aren’t enough highlights in the book to string it along for half that long, brilliant though it is. I’d say if it isn’t finished in two seasons, it won’t get a third.
Casting will make or break this, though, especially as they’ll have to rely on African-American actors for the main character IIRC. This isn’t to diss AA actors, there are lots of good ones out there, but the big names are either too old or completely wrong. (Will Smith, anyone?) Low Key and Wednesday will also be hard to cast well, but easier to do altogether.
While I love the thought of an American Gods filmatization, I’d prefer a 3 1/2 hour movie rather than a 30-60 hour monstrosity over the span of six years!
That said, this is HBO, who I trust explicitly to not fuck things up. Well, at least not the obvious things.
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As opposed to all those other series in which casting is irrelevant?
Seriously, though, you’re right and bad casting choices will ruin it irrevocably. I hope that they have the courage to go mostly with no-name actors; that way the focus can be on the story, not on someone’s career. -
Do they get HBO? Aren’t they already wildly offended by HBO programming?
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I think you could do two, maybe three seasons with the material in American Gods; there’s a lot there and it will really suffer if it’s badly compressed; witness the hot mess that was Pillars of the Earth. Beyond that, as long as Neil Gaiman is involved, I trust that it will be pretty good.
Huh? I never had the impression that Shadow was black. I kind of imagined him as looking sort of like Aaron Eckhart, but more muscular, and better looking / rugged.
Six seasons? Ok, so what happens if/when they cancel it after two?
Isn’t it awfully rare for HBO (or anybody) to plan more than one or two seasons of a new show? Especially something as expensive as this?
I’ll watch. I wasn’t nuts about the book – I didn’t catch most of the references – but I like good fantasy and maybe the series will educate me.
As for Under the Dome, I’ve been googling and can’t find anything from HBO, just articles quoting King as saying it might be a miniseries.
I think he’s described as having light brown skin that could place him any racial category. I seem to remember that it was a minor plot point that Shadow was of indeterminate race. He didn’t know himself, and people would ask him if he was black, Latino, Indian, or what. I think his mother was white, but his father was presumably something else. No one guessed Norse god
His mother died of complications from sickle-cell. From the way he’s described and how the other characters talk to/about him he looks like he could be a variety of ethnicities. I picture him as a less burly Vin Diesel.
I think 6 seasons sound way too long. I’ll watch anyways.
I was kinda meh on the book, but I like Neil Gaiman’s other stuff enough that I’m willing to give the story another look in this form.
Darn, you dont read Lovecraft, and you’ve never heard of “American Gods” as well, do you have something against good litterature?
Disagree, “Beowulf” had problems, but certainly not with dialogue and characterization.
BTW, “Neverwear” is a nudie flick set on the various nudist beaches of America. Not written by Gaiman as far as I’m aware.
Of the various things that I love about “American Gods” is how subtly was that played out. He barely brushes the subject, and yet, for the whole of the book, I was wondering what Shadow was looking like. But it’s not put on the table as if it was an important point at all, yet it is essential to the characterization of Shadow.
As the core of the book is Shadow looking reluctantly for what he is.
You have more than enough to get a feel of the character, yet would be hard pressed to correctly and precisely describe him.
I dont have great hopes for a series unless Gaiman writes it. Six seasons seems overkill. A twelve episodes season is more than enough. Or a six or height episodes prestige mini series.
I thought the novel American Gods had a brilliant premise but poor execution and terrible ending. Maybe in the HBO version they’ll fix some of the problems with it.
I much preferred Anansi Boys which is a sorta kinda related book by Gaiman that came later. He actually was in talks to do a movie of it but, quite understandably, wouldn’t budge on letting them cast a white actor to play the lead (who is the son of an African trickster god), for which I’m grateful.
I pictured Sean Connery when reading the novel A-G as Mr. Wednesday. Brian Blessed also. Since they’re both a bit long in the tooth now, Mark Addy from Game of Thrones wouldn’t be bad.
For a moment, I thought you were saying that Neil Gaiman had written a porno! Damn!
I liked that too. I liked even more that I don’t think anywhere in Anansi Boys is it explicitly stated that Fat Charlie or any of the other characters is black. If it is, it’s rather subtly mentioned later in the book. What is mentioned explicitly is that a certain character is white. It very effectively sets the scene without drawing attention to race at all.
I think it bothered me before I read Anansi Boys, but now especially it bothers me when I read any character in a novel described as black if none of the other characters have been described as a certain race.
Ursula K. LeGuin is another author who is always very subtle with race and usually has non-white protagonists. In The Left Hand of Darkness (her masterpiece) she casually mentions at one point that the inhabitants of the planet Winter are mostly medium to light brown, much lighter than the Earthling protagonist. I believe that’s the only hint we get of what Genly Ai looks like or what his background is.