Here the dream sequences are more epic and portentous, involving visions of petrified forests carpeted with human skeletons and ceilinged by the vast, cold cosmos. Except this eight-episode story's supernatural overtones feel considerably more appropriate to Fuller's baroque, nightmarish-operatic flourishes than Hannibal's serial-killer antics which, quite frankly, became so overwrought they got silly. Though it's adapted from very different source material, and co-written with Michael Green (who worked on Heroes and Smallville), American Gods feels like a stylistic sequel to Hannibal, with the first two episodes directed by one-time Hannibal regular David Slade. The glass-eyed Mr Wednesday's true nature isn't hard to guess (and if you're familiar with Neil Gaiman's source novel then you already know), but he certainly has a better reason for seeming omniscient than Mikkelsen's Dr Lecter ever did. "I was merely passing the time as instinct indicated," he drily mock-protests when Shadow (Ricky Whittle) returns from his wife's funeral to find a naked young woman in Wednesday's motel bed. Despite also being a sophisticated charmer, in his own words "a hustler, a swindler, a cheater and a liar" who comes in the perfectly cast form of Ian McShane, he’s rakish and mischievous, with a taste for blondes and a talent for a delicious turn of phrase McShane relishes the role like a crow gorging on freeway roadkill. This is a show where the borders of reality itself are porous.Īs for this show's devil? Well, in fact quite different from Hannibal. At one point, in a "Did that just happen?" meta-moment (we rewound it to check), the blood-trailing limb sails right in front of the picture's black-barred widescreen framing. During the first episode's 813 AD-set prologue, for example, we witness a blood-drenched Viking battle in which a severed, sword-clutching arm arcs through the air in elegant slo-mo. In Fuller's latest venture American Gods, that detail now focuses on such trashy Americana as a dive bar shaped like a giant gator mouth the hidden mechanisms of everyday objects (as shown through impressive macro photography of a jukebox and door-lock in these first two episodes) and some gloriously ultraviolent tableaux. And that devil, of course, being Dr Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), a sophisticated charmer and an arch-manipulator so consistently a step ahead of everyone else you suspected he was omniscient. That detail most often involving gorgeously photographed gourmet dinners and artfully eviscerated corpses. In Hannibal, showrunner Bryan Fuller was all about the devil in the detail.
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