The third season of American Gods is an attempt to restore lost momentum from the second season, taking advantage of a grace note in the novel it’s slowly adapting - its protagonist’s sojourn in a small town - to rebuild itself. So does his dead wife Laura (Emily Browning), who has been wandering Earth as an undead revenant with the leprechaun Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber, sadly missing this season outside of some flashbacks), along with an eclectic cast of gods and those who know them.Īll of this is rather perfunctory. Naturally, they do not, because Shadow has a part to play. He makes a home for himself in Lakeside, Wisconsin, an idyllic small town where gods new and old will hopefully leave him the hell alone. (I should probably note here that in the world of American Gods, worship is what makes them godlike, so the forgotten old gods are mostly normal people with a few mythic tricks.) These new gods represent our modern obsessions: new media, technology, and so on. Until recently, Shadow was driving Wednesday across America to recruit the country’s forgotten gods, soliciting their aid in a coming war between them and the nation’s new ones. He’s Odin, the Norse All-Father - and also Shadow’s IRL dad. Wednesday is not just some impossible boss. Instead, it’s concerned with rebuilding itself and doing the fascinating work of making a season that’s equal parts a total do-over and a straightforward continuation of the story that started in episode one.Īnd so we are reintroduced to Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), a man living under an alias after a falling out with his employer, Mr. American Gods is no longer interested in that sort of thing. There are no fiery monologues, mind-bending sex scenes, or powerful vignettes that evoke the immigrant experience and humanity’s relationship with faith.
Season 3 also doesn’t resemble what drew many to American Gods in the first place. ( Allegations surrounding Jones’ dismissal are troubling.) This makes the third season more surprising: after all that chaos, it’s turned out totally fine. Between the second season finale and the premiere of the latest season, the show’s new management fired Orlando Jones, whose fiery portrayal of the trickster god Anansi was beloved and one of the show’s brightest stars. The Starz drama was a special kind of disaster: it premiered to considerable acclaim only to fall to pieces in between its first and second seasons, losing its high-profile showrunners and several cast members. Which is why it’s a pretty big story when something as large as American Gods goes awry. There are a lot of places to mess up! And yet we hear about so few mistakes. First consider the countless people working across departments and disciplines needed to make a single episode happen and then consider that they all have to do it anywhere between eight and 20-ish times a year, and that the result has to make sense to millions of people who cannot wait to be unimpressed.
One of the miracles of any good television show is that it even works at all.
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