American Gods gets another season, yet another new showrunner to try to keep this circus on track
Another year, another person plopped down in charge of Starz’s famously difficult-to-manage Neil Gaiman adaptation American Gods. Variety reports that the cable network has just granted a third season to the supernatural epic—behind-the-scenes drama and one tragic de-Gillian-Anderson-ing be damned—but also declared that it’ll soon be in the hands of series newcomer (and TV veteran) Charles “Chic” Eglee.
At this point, the story of American Gods’ various showrunners is almost as sprawling as Gaiman’s original book, about a war between new gods and old waged in the shadows of America’s most beloved tourist traps. First, there were Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, who bailed and/or got totally fired over budget overruns at the end of the show’s first season; they begat Jesse Alexander, who reportedly clashed repeatedly with the show’s cast over his attempts to steer the show more closely in line with Gaiman’s original book. Now they’ve got Eglee, whose genre fare includes stuff like Hemlock Grove and The Walking Dead, but who could also be seen as a resolutely steady hand on the tiller of a frequently shaky boat—this is a guy who came up on St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, and NYPD Blue, after all, and thus presumably knows a thing or two about keeping a series intact. (Okay, not so much Moonlighting, but you get our point.) Gaiman issued a statement today expressing effusive praise for Eglee, calling him “the perfect partner in crime,” but, then, he did pretty much the exact same thing for the last three guys, too.
The second season of American Gods debuted last Sunday, re-inviting viewers into its world of scheming deities and opulent carousels. Our own take on the show’s second run is still pinging at “cautiously optimistic”; although we’ve got concerns that whatever subtle alchemy Fuller and Green found to bring Gaiman’s esoteric world to life might be waning, there’s still enough magic there to keep us tuning in—at least, so far. We’ll have to wait and see if Eglee can get the show on track, or if we’ll be writing this same damn Newswire a year from now when Starz once again has to go looking for a replacement who can reliably get this series on the air.