"American Gods," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

I had to check multiple times to make sure that this season of "American Gods" only had eight episodes, because I couldn't quite wrap my head around how it ended.  Quite a lot happened this season, but it feels like we barely made any progress from week to week, and the finale landed with a mighty thud. That's not to say that this season was all bad - there are at least two excellent episodes - but as a whole it stumbles pretty badly.

Much of the dive in quality is due to the show's behind-the-scenes chaos.  Creators Bryan Fuller and Michael Green departed, taking a few important members of the cast with them, and leaving everyone else with a mess.  Media has been replaced by a far more awkward New Media (Kahyun Kim). Easter and Jesus are nowhere in sight. Instead, we have more of Anansi and Bliquis hanging around, without actually doing much except sniping at each other.  Ditto the Jinn and Salim (Omid Abtahi), who are now traveling as a pair. Shadow and Wednesday spend much of the season trying to reforge Wednesday's spear, and Laura and Mad Sweeney are still trying to bring Laura back to life. There's constant talk of carnage, but little action.

The premiere episode with the meeting of the Old Gods at the House on the Rock is something that the first season had been building to, and it was great to finally see it.  However, the meeting and aftermath were some of the only parts of the season where it felt like anything consequential happened. The war between the gods remains an amorphous, mostly theoretical thing.  Characters die, but it's been made clear that nearly everyone can come back to life in one form or another. There's a lot of waiting around, and Shadow's battles are mostly internal. Of course, that isn't all that different from the first season, where the show was mostly just a road trip adventure punctuated by all these smaller stories about the various gods in the past and present.  

The trouble is that these smaller stories aren't executed with nearly the same deftness or boldness as we saw under Fuller's directions.  As Matt Zoller Seitz lamented in his review, the sexuality has been cut to practically nothing but insinuations. The hallucinatory dream sequences are fewer and briefer, and the violence just doesn't have the same oomph that it used to.  I thought that Fuller overdid the surrealism sometimes, but his excesses at least gave "American Gods" a certain verve and vibrancy that helped it to stand out from the crowd. Now, there are so many of the show's little conceits that feel underdeveloped.  The Indian goddess Mama-ji (Sakina Jaffrey) pops up a few times as a waitress. Argus (Christian Lloyd) appears as the god of surveillance. There's also new Native American character for about five minutes. Nobody really has anything to do except kvetch and deliver half-baked advice.  

However, there are some things that the show gets very right.  Ricky Whittle is getting a bit better as Shadow, and I liked the flashback episode that explores his early days as a new immigrant in America.  Ian McShane's Wednesday continues to impress, and we see some different sides of him. However, far and away the best hour of "American Gods" this year is all about Mad Sweeney, and his tangled history.  Pablo Schrieber gives the best performance of his career playing multiple versions of the character through the ages. I really hope he still has time for "American Gods" going forward, as he's set to play Master Chief for the upcoming "Halo" series.

I'm honestly a little stunned that "American Gods" has been renewed for another season at least, which will be a much more structured thing as it moves into a mystery storyline from the book that will require a bit of a format change.  However, I'll still be watching because this show's highs are still high enough that it's been worth waiting through the rougher stuff. However, I hope the production manages to pull itself together. Even if the plot isn't all that important, and we're meant to just be sightseeing in this universe, the attractions should at least be in good working order.  

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