Daily American Gods

AMERICAN GODS RENEWED FOR SEASON 2

Starz has ordered a second season of its high-profile fantasy series American Gods, which premiered to solid numbers on the pay-cable network April 30. The series, produced by FremantleMedia North America, has already netted more than 5 million viewers across its multiple platforms.

Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s series, based on Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, posits a world where America has created its own set of cultural deities — gods manifested into reality based on decades of national obsession over things like technology and consumerism. At the same time, America has also welcomed centuries’ worth of old gods from all over the world, brought to the country by generations of immigrant believers, but as these worshippers have waned, so has the power of the old gods.

American Gods EPs answer burning questions from series premiere

Here, Fuller and Green attempt to extinguish some of our burning questions from our first outing with the American Gods.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why did you decide to start the series with the Vikings’ coming to America sequence? MICHAEL GREEN: The Vikings sequence was one of the first big hills that we had to die on, production-wise, for a number of reasons. It’s gigantic. It took us several days of filming that didn’t include a single main character. It was going to require a lot of stunts and stuntmen, and we needed to build a boat. With the exception of the first shot when they’re on the water, that’s a real boat we bought, and we knew exactly how many dollars that would cost. The sequence was originally the top of episode 2, but it was very important to us to start these episodes, especially early on, with not just a tonal land grab but, well, a tonal land grab of something unexpected and strange and funny to us and, though it seems off point, is thematically necessary. BRYAN FULLER: Originally, the opening was going to be Mrs. Fadil meeting Anubis in her Brooklyn apartment, which now opens episode 3. Michael and I were very conscious of how male the first episode was leaning, so we wanted to start with that scene, because really the only strong female presence in the first episode is Bilquis, and we wanted to have more female energy in it. But what we discovered is that the very male Viking opening spoke to the overall themes and arc of the series better than the story with Mrs. Fadil, so there was some shuffling of the Somewhere in Americas in the first two episodes as we were figuring out what the show was and what the story it needed to tell was.