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American Gods
2017 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Bryan Fuller, Michael Green
DramaMysteryScience FictionFantasy
An ex-con becomes the traveling partner of a conman who turns out to be one of the older gods trying to recruit troops to battle the upstart deities. Based on Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel.
4 positive3 negative16 neutralfrom 23 commenters
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24 comments on Hacker News
The TV show American Gods becoming reality...
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
There's an American Gods episode like that where Vulcan hangs out.
Plays in the historical days skipped the 'sex scenes'.
When I want to watch a story, all this 'sex' stuff just gets in the way.
The animated tv show 'Captain Fall' went from edgy to just down right ugg. Even 'American Gods' has a good premise but with un needed injection of 'sex scenes' it just slowed down the plot and in the end, just started to skip 10-20mins of of just to move the plot along.
The one tragedy is that they seem to be having issues keeping the self-playing instruments in good repair. Many were barely functional last I was there a few years back.
Of interest is that House on the Rock is the setting for the showdown at end end of Season 1 of "American Gods". Worth a watch if you enjoy the place.
newspaper: media
radio: media
tv: media
facebook: media
All prior guesses have always been right, but information control changes name and shape every few decades. :)
Reminds me of the transformation of the character Media to New Media in the TV show American Gods.
Well, the trouble with American Gods is they streeeetched the original material so much that I stopped watching somewhere at the beginning of the 2nd season.
Felt like the Hobbit - if you cut off 2/3 of it it may be a great movie but as it is it's a bore.
But are those representative of the average 1-2 showrunner outputs? No. They’re not. Most tv sucks. The fact that some shows are not in the top 10 greatest series of all time is irrelevant.
I would say the marvel tv series so far have been pretty solid. Even if you don’t like them because you have an allergic reaction to marvel, their execution has been really good.
If we must talk of THE BEST, then season 1 of American gods on StarZ was the best season of television I’ve ever seen. Mostly all written by Bryan fuller and Michael Greene. Not entirely. How do we weigh this? Hard to say, but man did that show crash and burn when they left.
This is going to be a disaster, Like GoT Season 8 level diaster. Mark my words. My reasoning:
1. The budget for the original LOTR trilogy was $281 million [1]. Obviously there's inflation but we're also talking film vs TV. Films tend to be much more expensive to produce to the point where only theatrical releases tend to make films economical;
2. The showrunners are JD Vance and Patrick McKay. If you check their IMDB profiles they have almost no credits. How on Earth did they get this job? To put this in context: films are run by directors. Producers work for the director. TV shows are run by showrunners, which are really producers. Directors work for the producers. There's good reason for this. The showrunners need to maintain consistency across the entire season while individual episode directors will manage the schedule for their own episode.
Producers are writers and you'd expect that any producer has a long list of writing credits and a premium TV showrunner will have lots of producer and writer credits.
3. No name recognition in the actors that I can see. There's nothing wrong with eelvating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition. It builds hype and recognized actors tend to be recognized for a reason. GoT had Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. There were also seasoned actors who just weren't well known (eg Lena Headley);
4. A lot of shows go downhill when they run out of original material. It happened to GoT in apsectacular fashion. It happened to the Handmaid's Tale (the book only covered Season 1). It takes a strong writing team to generate good original material. Being in Middle Earth is both a blessing and a curse. There is source material like the Silmarillion but that can also hamstring you in a way that greenfield writing isn't.
5. Statements made suggest the showrunners and Amazon just don't get the tone of Middle Earth, like they were trying to make GoT in Middle Earth. Not everything has to be GoT. Jackson understood LOTR. It's why his vision was so good.
6. Spinoffs are hard. The most successful spinoffs are organic. Frasier (from Cheers) and Better Caul Saul (from Breaking Bad) spring to mind. Both came from a successfully developed character that was proven to audiences and thus also had inbuilt interest. HBO is busy throwing mud at the wall to see if any GoT spinoff will stick. Even now I'm not sure HBO has any idea of how badly D&D shit the bed with GoT season 8. It undermined the interest in earlier seasons and nobody talks about GoT now. In seasons 3-5 they were actually showing episodes in theaters (even IMAX theaters). Think about that. Nobody cares about these spinoffs and D&D are a big part of why. But they're also not organic.
If you want to see what happens without strong leadership and understanding the source material, look at the Hobbit (yes Jackson was involved but he came in very late).
Amazon has committed $1 billion to this and I believe they are obligated to produce at least 5 seasons. I predict we'll see 2 or even 3 different showrunners in that time and the whole thing will likely be incoherent. Look at American Gods Season 1 to 2 or the downfall of The Walking Dead for just how much this can doom a project.
[1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-amazon-1-billion-1202127879/
Did they say the Marvel comic book character or just a comic book character? Because American gods was also ported to comics, and even a TV show.
He made text art that when printed on a T-Shirt became a facsimile of the design of a semi-recent comic (not film) Loki.
The exact text is "Low Key," which as a pseudonym for Loki predates Marvel's use by at least a few years when Neil Gaiman used it for Loki in American Gods.
What? Really?
Well, for a start, the hilarious _Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, witch._ Co-written with Terry Pratchett, also a great radio serial and a wonderful TV series from about 3 years ago.
Secondly, multiple superb novels, such as _Stardust_ and _Coraline_, both adapted into successful feature films; _Neverwhere_, a low-budget British TV series; and _American Gods_, a huge, big-budget TV series.
Everything he has written has a rich vein of humour. Even perhaps the most tragic of the Sandman series, _Death: The Sound of her Wings_.
"You keep doing that, you know what you're going to get? "FAT PIGEONS!"
I tried it for "American Gods" and it says Season 3: planned for undefined, but Season 3 has already started.
> I've watched the first, and consider it to be 13 hours of my life completely wasted
I really enjoyed the first season. I've "trained" myself to enjoy TV / movies that "get nowhere" as long as they manage to keep my attention. And "The OA" does that.
> Does it get better in the 2nd season?
Regarding the 2nd season, I'm my opinion, there are _a lot_ of scify TV series that start more or less well /interesting (Colony & Falling skies are 2 examples of this). But - I take it to get people interested fast - make big bets in their first season, and then keeping that rhythm proves an impossible task. Falling Skies, for instance, was a complete disappointment. It's like you get people to invent nukes and in the next season they go back to fight with bows & arrows.
I want to keep this spoiler free, but let me tell you this: The 2nd season of "The OA" gets effing weird. Like, really. It's not as hardcore as "Legion", where you need to grow a 2nd brain to understand what the heck is going on, or high fantasy tune as "American Gods" but I found it really entertaining - although at points the story drags a little - but they managed to build / invent a rather interesting universe, that unfortunately we'll never get to see again.
I had to look up the guy that actually designed it, and I realized they have pretty much made all the intro cinematics I adore from TV shows.
Westworld, American Gods, Man in the High Castle and Halt and Catch Fire.
https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/raoul-marks/
https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/halt-and-catch-fire/
They raised their prices and shut down several popular series early. I cancelled my subscription last week because I was finding it hard to find something good to watch that I hadn't seen yet. I'm now catching up on a few things on Amazon Prime like the Expanse season 3, American Gods, Good Omens and a few other things. I will probably switch back in a few months when Netflix has added a few things that I might want to see. They do have a few series that they haven't killed yet that I would want to see. Apparently, they keep your profile and settings for 10 months. This suggests that I'm not the only one shopping around.
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
This was literally a plot point in the last episode of American Gods.
So the turn-around time from sci-fi to reality is... less than a week now?
This entire field is completely messed up. One of my favorite movies this year is from India, I don't usually see Bollywood movies but Manikarnika rocked. It opened in January and now, it's been out on Amazon Prime since Saturday:
https://www.justwatch.com/ca/search?q=manikarnika
In Canada.
In the USA?
https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=manikarnika
Not so much.
This only drives piracy -- it obviously has been ripped and it is available on torrent.
Other side of the coin, I subscribed to Amazon Prime to watch American Gods and it takes more than 24 hours for the latest episode to get to Canada from the USA. It is literally faster to drive across the border, record it and drive back. That's insane. Oh and there's no indication of when it drops. People posted the question for UK and there's simply no answer.
I honestly can say, I tried to move away from piracy -- I have been pirating things since 1985 -- but when I look at https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1110254374192889857 and the availability, I despair and just want to give up. I have the money but having all of these are just annoying. Every service has its own interface and problems. Like, you can't Chromecast Amazon Prime unless you cast the browser tab and that sucks quality wise. And yes, quality! Amazon Prime is not always 1080p but what I torrent is always 1080p and never degrades. Netflix is better quality wise for sure, it was the first I subscribed to watch their Marvel stuff... but I am really not keen on having eventually eight or a dozen different services to search when I just want to watch a movie and deal with the quirks of each.
Piracy is a service problem and these guys are making the service worse and worse every day.
Ps. try searching Roku stick on Amazon.ca , the first result is "Roku® Streaming Stick | Portable, power-packed player with voice remote with TV power and volume | US version – Not intended for use in Canada".
That's a trend with oligopolies in the entertainment industry. The same reasoning propels movie studios to remake the same franchise movies every year. Costs for AAA are large already -- why take risks?
IMO this is a sign video games are reaching the stage of Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," where popular franchises become part of the culture with life of their own.
As a consumer, I'd rather the large players invest in new creative ideas. Create new franchises and more diverse ideas.
But I'm not their audience for video games nor AAA movies...
Do you mean original as in first-as-a-series, or original as in something that hasn't been made for tv/movies yet? If the latter, there are tons:
- The Expanse
- American Gods, Good Omens
- Kingkiller Chronicles (being produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda)
- Wheel of Time
However, if you mean the former, then I agree, although there are new shows, they just don't have high budgets like those with followings already.
I've not seen a conservative one of these yet.
Ive seen plenty of them. They rail against any sign of diversity as an attack on their white, heterosexual normalcy. Check out the forums on IGN. They are outraged by the sight of a penis in a tv show (American Gods) or a person of colour cast in a leading role.
Video compression is not understood well enough throughout the whole stack yet.
I recently got a 1080p projector for home use, so now movies / TV series in my home are viewed on a 100" screen. Content is mostly from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Netflix does a really good job with encoding. I cannot say the same for Amazon Prime Video; even with their exclusive (in UK) offerings, like American Gods or Mr Robot, the quality of the encode is quite poor when viewed on a big screen. Banding, shimmering blocky artifacts on subtle gradients, insufficient bit budget for dimly lit scenes - once you become aware of the issues, it becomes really distracting.
OTOH a really big screen is a fantastic ad for high quality high bitrate content. Anything less than 2GB/hour is noticeably poor.
I have recently rediscovered the book. (Well, mostly eBooks via Kindle apps...)
I read a lot when I was younger, but for some reason kind of stopped for a while. Now I read quite often again, and I love it. eBooks make it easy too. Click, boom, done, and if the author publishes directly or has a decent contract they get 50-70% of my purchase price.
There is a ton of very good literature out there: smart dramas, mysteries, sci-fi, quirky stuff like Gaiman's American Gods, classics I've never bothered to read, etc. The field is a lot larger, due in part to the fact that the capital requirements are essentially nonexistent. Anyone can write a book.
I'm not holding my breath on Hollywood. If movies have hope, it's from the indy scene doing interesting things on small budgets.