STARZ’s American Gods was one of the many shows to premiere a new trailer and feed their fans with content at this year’s NYCC. The series, which is based on the book by legend Neil Gaiman; is a trippy sort of show that brings forth old and new gods, duking it out with humans often as collateral damage. With the book having been written in 1999, a lot has changed – even Technical Boy’s (Bruce Langley) appearance. In the book, you can think of the a-typical person you’d imagine sitting behind a computer for hours at a time in the basement of their home, but the on-screen adaptation of the god of modern technology features a young man with very unique taste in fashion.
Another change is a new god being brought into the show. While Gillian Anderson played Media, who has been supposedly around since the Roswell incident in the early to mid-1900s. While Anderson isn’t returning for the second season, Gaiman confirms she isn’t dead. Instead, we’ll be bringing in Kahyun Kim as New Media, which the creator explains:
“The biggest thing that simply didn’t exist in the book was social media. That was why we knew we needed a New Media. You know people go “Oh, the New Media, so you’ve replaced Media?” And it’s like “No, no Media…she’s somewhere still out there wandering around. She just has less and less people watching her, less belief and power. New Media is New Media.
It’s that stuff. It’s the fact that everybody…we’re in this sort of strange, Snapchat-y generation where likes seems to matter, but we don’t really know what they mean. All we know is we get this tiny little endorphin buzz from being told that we’ve been given them. That kind of thing I think is very new.”
We’ll also be seeing a character that is partially based on the four-eyed giant Argus of Greek mythology, who will be exploring the nature of the American surveillance state. Gaiman explains the inspiration:
“One of the things that we didn’t have when I wrote the book was that we were not observed. Now there are cameras on us most of the time. I remember discovering how much we’re observed once when my backpack went missing in a hotel and I wound up being led into the security bowels.
[On the cameras], they replayed every bit of my movement so we could figure out what had happened to the backpack. And actually what had happened was we realized that it had made it all the way into the room with me and then had been carefully put aside into a cupboard by a cleaning person who had locked it away from me. I had no idea you could do that and [the security people] were like ‘oh, yeah. You can do that anywhere now.’”
As a huge fan of the show, I’m more than excited to see both the old characters we’ve gotten to know and love, while being introduced to new gods. You can catch up on American Gods and await the next season in 2019.
Source: io9