Praise be! In July we lost our collective shit over the announcement that Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Hannibal), Michael Green (Kings, Heroes) and Neil Gaiman (weird, perfect) would be executive producing a TV adaptation of Gaiman’s beloved 2001 book American Gods for Starz. And it just keeps getting better: For Gods fans who might have been worried that the spirit and enormous scope of the novel would be lost in its transition to the small screen, Fuller made some statements today that should reassure even the most intense of Gaiman purists.
In an interview with CraveOnline, the showrunner said the series is on-track to shoot in 2015 with an air date in 2016, adding:
It’s basically the following the events of the books, but expanding those events, and expanding the point of view to go above and beyond Shadow and Wednesday. In that way, as with Game of Thrones, there are dozens of characters that you’re tracking through the events and that’s probably the biggest similarities between the worlds, in that there’s a wide variety of characters at play.
(Interestingly, HBO actually passed on American Gods in 2011. Eat your heart out, Home Box Office!) In the interview Fuller also hints that elements from Gaiman’s 2005 book Anansi Boys will make an appearance in the show, and says the author himself “god damn well better” script some of the episodes. Speaking on Gaiman’s executive producer role and involvement in the series, Fuller said:
He’s given birth to the baby, raised to the baby, and now Michael Green and I are marrying the baby. […] So the relationship is similar [to George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones] in that way, where he is absolutely integral to the process and also very excited just to see it coming together in the fashion that it is.
And, unlike A Song of Ice and Fire readers, American Gods fans probably don’t need to worry that the show will distract its creator from his work–Gaiman announced the completion of a new book just yesterday, so we should be set for awhile.
(via Coming Soon)
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