We still don’t know who will star in American Gods, the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman‘s novel which marks the major post-Hannibal project for producer Bryan Fuller. Now we do know, however, that the Starz series will bring another veteran of Fuller’s last series into the fold. Hannibal director and exec producer David Slade is signing on to helm the pilot of the new series, and it sounds like he’ll be just as involved in American Gods as he was with Hannibal.

In addition to directing the pilot and other episodes, Slade will serve as an exec producer on the show, reports Deadline. American Gods has Fuller and Michael Green as showrunners.

It’ll be a while before we see American Gods. The show is in pre-production now, but isn’t expected to debut on Starz until 2017. The show did get a straight-to-series order from Starz, so that’s a good sign, but at this point there’s more we don’t know about the show than stuff we do.

One other bit we know is that Neil Gaiman is scripting at least some episodes. He had written at least a pilot script when American Gods was at HBO a couple years ago, and he even added some material to that take on the story. That was material that hadn’t ended up fitting in the original novel. Oddly, the new stuff was actually a sticking point for HBO, which wanted something closer to the book. At Starz, presumably that won’t be a problem.

Gaiman had said previously,

I am thrilled, scared, delighted, nervous and a ball of glorious anticipation. The team that is going to bring the world of American Gods to the screen has been assembled like the master criminals in a caper movie: I’m relieved and confident that my baby is in good hands. Now we finally move to the exciting business that fans have been doing for the last dozen years: casting our Shadow, our Wednesday, our Laura…”

Here’s the story synopsis: