Bryan Fuller, the man who gave us the Hannibal TV series, is at Comic-Con this weekend promoting not one, but two new TV shows: a new Star Trek series and American Gods. Star Trek hasn't started filming yet but American Gods is well into production with a premiere date sometime in 2017 on Starz. American Gods is based on the novel of the same name written by Neil Gaiman, and the hope from Starz is the show has multiple seasons in its hopefully long future. The show, however, is based on one novel, leaving many fans to wonder how Bryan Fuller and crew planned to split it up to make enough material for television. The answer is actually pretty simple.
Bryan Fuller and fellow producer Michael Green are gearing up for a panel in room 6BCF at Comic-Con today, but the two recently did an interview with Deadline to give out some early details. Of the many topics discussed, one of the most important was how the duo divided the enough material for numerous seasons, and Fuller confirmed that the first season will not end when the book does.
No, it feels like the book would be anywhere from three to four seasons, depending on where we get into as we're arcing out the second season. The first season was fairly easy to arc out when we went, 'Oh, this point in the book, that's where we end the first season.
Now that we have a solid idea of how long the show could potentially be, I'm sure my fellow book readers are doing the calculations to figure out at which point in the story each season will take place. The novel is filled with a lot of material and ideas, but it's mainly focused on ex-con Shadow (played by The 100's Rickie Whittle) so it's limited in that regard. It's not like Game of Thrones, where you can spread stuff out by focusing on dozens of characters. Fuller went on to elaborate that the key to getting multiple seasons was to slow things down. WAY down.
In the original discussion when we were breaking out the arc of the show, we thought what was originally going to be the ending was actually going to be around Episode 5. Then we just thought, let's just slow this way down, and at the encouragement of the network, who have been incredibly supportive of what we want to do with the show, and their note, essentially, was slow down. We want this to last a while.
It's been a little while since I read the book, but I remember it was already slow to begin with (there's a lot of driving to places). We already know that the American Gods series will be giving some characters more focus than they had in the books so that's another way to spread it out. I'm still a little skeptical about the show, but it has such an interesting take on mythology that I want to see what Fuller and Green will do with it. Plus, you can't argue with Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday.
American Gods will debut in 2017 and you can watch it on the Starz network. Be sure to check in with CinemaBlend after the American Gods panel because there's bound to be some new information for the series.
