American Gods, an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novel by TV showrunner Bryan Fuller, has certainly got people talking. A gay sex scene between Muslim men, a goddess who devours worshippers in her vagina – the talking points have been plentiful. American Gods has also been genuinely innovative television, pushing at the boundaries of the medium in 2017. Here’s how …



Penises

Let’s deal with the big, throbbing issue first: there are a lot of plonkers in American Gods. Penises are used to shock (as in the discovery of an adulterous dick pic), and they are used for naturalistic effect (the appearance of a naked god sets the tone for a caring gay sex scene). They are hard, they are soft, they are big, they are small. They are exposed to the viewer’s gaze, like so many breasts over the years. It should be a small thing (amirite lads?), and this isn’t the first show to expose the male member, but in demystifying it this drama is going where many other shows will not.

Identity

As complicated a female character as Cersei Lannister or Peggy Olson … Laura Moon with Shadow Moon. Photograph: Jan Thijs/Starz

American Gods has an African-Caribbean lead and three African-Caribbean gods (two male, one female). It has a central gay character, who is also an Arab. There are a number of key roles for older actors (from Ian McShane to Cloris Leachman), one of whom has a disability (McShane’s Wednesday has only one eye). A regular segment in the show explores the mythology of different races. It has a character called Mexican Jesus. I admire American Gods most for having created, in the hero’s wife Laura Moon, as involving and complicated a female character as Games of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister and Mad Men’s Peggy Olson. In fact Laura, a reanimated corpse who died in the act of cheating on her husband, is a more complex sell than either. She’s a loathsome egotist and yet, you kind of root for her.

Visuals

Fuller earned some renown for the visual grotesquerie of his series Hannibal, with its torrents of blood and cascades of body parts. To an extent he has re-created that style in American Gods; certainly there has been sufficient balletic bloodletting. However, Fuller, who adapted Gaiman’s novel for the small screen, has also broadened his palette with this series. Most gobsmacking is the show’s digital world, where perspective shortens, colours are saturated and everything becomes just a little psychedelic. (People’s faces metamorphose in small blocks, looking like a pixellated SpongeBob meme). There are also regular coups de camera, such as vertical panning shots that descend through blocks of flats, and ultra slo-mo passages so glacial that the beams of light in a photocopier take on the form of snowflakes. There are even dramatic interludes performed by puppets. As impressive as its visual imagination is the frequency with which it’s realised.

Swearing

Every character is prone to an F-word … Ian McShane brings the foul-mouthed flair of his Deadwood character Al Swearengen. Photograph: Jan Thijs/AP

Now, Americans have a funny relationship with swearing. They’re like the Sun newspaper: prudish when it happens in public but desperate to use it. American Gods, which airs on the provocative channel Starz in the US and Amazon in the UK, has been so full of cursing that you feel someone had an allocation to use up. Every character is prone to an intensifying F-word (including McShane who has reprised some of the foul-mouthed flair of his Deadwood character Al Swearengen). One character, however – a self-identifying leprechaun by the name of Mad Sweeney – has made a grab for the C-word and won’t let it up. It may be pushing at boundaries, but I find it hard to listen to. My opinion is shared by Laura Moon, who this week grabs him by the lips and smashes his head against a taxi partition.



Morality

Now American Gods isn’t Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. This may not come as a surprise. But through its central conceit – a conflict between the “Old Gods” of belief and the “New Gods” of attention – it asks real questions about what we value as people and what happens when we let those values drift. It’s a show about belief, about love and about self-determination. While its politics are straightforwardly liberal Hollywood, what it observes about its characters is far more nuanced. American Gods is so much more than just an eye-popping visual spectacle. Though to be clear, it is that too ...

American Gods continues on Sundays on Starz in the US and on Mondays on Amazon Prime in the UK.