As I write this I have just woken up to the news that Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, a genuine cult hit if ever there was one, is to be given the teleseries treatment. After a similar deal with HBO had bombed, Starz have taken up the challenge. Whether this is good news or bad, I have yet to decide.
Let’s start with the negative angle. With Gaiman being something of a geek idol, his American Gods is considered his most seminal work. A sprawling tale of mythology, fantasy and American lore, it’s a bit of a massive opus. To put it simply, it’s based around the idea that gods only exist because we believe in them.
Terry Pratchett loosely does the same in Small Gods, which pre-empted Gaiman’s work, albeit in a different and obviously-satirical style. But I digress.
American Gods won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award when it was first published in 2001, and was released in an even longer edition (thus proving that once you’re an established name, all concept of editing goes out of the window) for its tenth year anniversary.
Did it deserve the awards? Definitely. The characters, the winding sub-plots, the witty one-liners... it’s the stuff of genius, on paper. Is it my favourite Gaiman? Certainly not. You do tend to get tired of it halfway through (go on, lynch me).
Unlike, say, The Sandman series, which Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Goyer have teamed up to produce. The announcement was made last year, but everything went mysteriously silent soon after, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the whole thing isn’t cancelled before it’s even started.
This isn’t the first time Gaiman’s works get an airing on the small or big screen. Coraline, which started out (supposedly) as a children’s story, was translated to a film with beautiful and eerie success. Produced in painstaking stop-motion and directed by Henry Selick, it translated to perfection Gaiman’s creation of a dark dreamworld that turns nasty.
Nowhere as awesome but still inifinitely watchable if you’re a Gaiman fan was BBC2’s Neverwhere – novel and series were actually released concurrently, in a departure from the usual method of first writing the book and then re-scripting it.
The series, when compared to today’s budgets, is no great shakes, but it’s still viewed affectionately by Gaiman fans.
Which brings us full circle back to American Gods. The best thing about this bit of news is that the pilot script is being written by Brian Fuller – him of Hannibal fame – and with Gaiman’s full co-operation. It’s difficult to imagine how such an alliance might go wrong.
Hannibal, which I resisted watching for ages (I mean seriously, haven’t we all had enough of Dr Lecter?) was something of a revelation for me. Turns out that no, we hadn’t had enough of Dr Lecter, particularly when packaged most beautifully, grotesquely and addictively. I’m hoping that a bit of this feel rubs off on American Gods, although the level of influence from part-scripting a pilot episode is debatable.
It’s difficult to imagine how such an alliance might go wrong
On to other news.
BBC’s Sherlock has been renewed for a further four episodes. The news was broken by means of a tweet – Miss me? #Sherlock #221 back – and suddenly the whole internet was broken by the frenzy that ensued.
If Gaiman fans are obsessive, Sherlock/Cumberbatch fans (or, Cumberbitches, in popular web lingo) are none less so. The funny thing is that the former tend to include the latter – although it doesn’t follow that the opposite is necessarily true. Ah, the infinite joys of the geeky Venn diagram.
I leave you with a bonus fun fact – the adaptation of Neverwhere to radio starred Cumberbatch and was aired on BBC. The perfect geek trifecta.
ramona.depares@timesofmalta.com