TV

My wife has been ill lately and so I haven't been able to go hiking as I normally would do. Needing to be closer to home I have turned to reading and watching TV and movies for leisure activities. Thus, I have been able to buy some new books and sit in front of the television and watch some shows.

One TV series that I watched was the AMERICAN GODS show on streaming video. I watched all of the episodes and what held me was not so much the premise or the scripts or any deep characterization or messages, but a few bits of good acting and casting choices.

The series (as was the novel) is based upon the idea of the fading away of the old gods (Nordic, Greek, various African, Asian, etc.), and the rising of newer deities based on the obsessions that modern humans have with technology (TV, computers, iphones, etc.). It's not a terribly clever premise and to tell you the truth I was not impressed with it either in prose or television format.

One of the big reveals in the series is the person of one of the major characters, Mr. Wednesday. We know he is a supernatural being, that he is a very big deal, but the average person is supposed to not know who he really is. Great Jove, I hope that people are not that simple-minded and stupid, but I suppose this is true. Ian McShane portrays Odin/Wotan about as he should be portrayed. It's rather a predictable performance...but you know what? I kind of enjoyed watching him do it.

The main protagonist is a man named "Shadow Moon" played by an actor named Ricky Whittle. He's an atypical liberal wet-dream kind of a cypher and I was not impressed by either that character or the actor doing the role. He's a decent enough performer, but there is nothing inspired in said performance. It's all very workmanlike. I also wearied of Shadow Moon constantly being amazed and bewildered by the things he was seeing when it had already become obvious for anyone else that he was walking amidst various gods and demons and their metaphysical hangers-on.

And this is what bugged me most about the series, and about Gaiman's writing in general (ever since his days penning perfectly precious comic books for goths and liberal goofs): there's nothing original there. It's all a reflection on things that have gone before, created by civilizations great and minor and being hauled out and fluffed up for modern viewing. Nothing new. All kind of tired and pathetic, really.

After a few episodes of this ceaseless copping of various cultures, all while being used to hammer us ceaselessly with the idea that conservative thought is bad and liberal speak is good, I began to grow very, very weary of it. But I kept going, more out of curiosity of how the actors might perform than by being hammered over the skull with one bleeding heart opinion after another couched in the language of the holier-than-thou smirk.

One episode which seemed at first to go completely off-rail--almost like something David Lynch would do--was a flashback to the 1700s wherein we are given some really waaaaay back back-story for Laura Moon (Shadow Moon's wife), featuring her great-great-grandmother hailing from Ireland and ending up in the New World. What this episode was revealed was nothing more than a condensed retelling of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders penned, it is said, by Daniel Dafoe. Again...this is the kind of thing about Gaiman's work that grates on my every last nerve. The dredging up of classic mythology and classic literature to use as substrate for his modern fiction. There's something there that I find rather dishonest in it all.

Still, that episode did obliquely co-star the character of Mad Sweeney who is actually a leprechaun who features prominently in almost all of the episodes. We see him a couple of hundred years ago and understand a little of perhaps why he keeps showing some amount of guilty attention toward Laura Moon. Still...it shouldn't have taken the hijacking of Dafoe's work to do that. Pablo Schreiber (half brother of the more popular and well known Liev Schreiber) regularly turns in the best acting in the show as Mad Sweeney. So there was that.

Later in the season--and I was waiting for it--there was an episode that reveled in its debasement of Christianity and the person of Jesus Christ. While I am not myself a Christian, I am always irked to see how the liberal set like Gaiman and company rarely sidestep a chance to make light of Christianity as rudely as they can. I could almost understand it if it was coming from the pen of an adolescent recently freeing himself from the yoke of tradition and the pedestrian. But this is all supposed to have been written by adults. Well...maybe emotionally stunted adults, or folk with a specific agenda to sell.

As I said, I kept watching because the series does have some good actors putting in some fine work. I never get tired of seeing what Peter Stormare brings to the screen, and his portrayal of Thor is good, with a helping of the humor he generally brings with him. Chloris Leachman is strange and vulnerable as an aging goddess. Crispin Glover is his usual, creepy, demented self as Mr. World, the top of the pyramid of neo-gods. And Gillian Anderson does some good scenes as Media, a kind of Hera to Mr. World's Zeus. Some scenes she does amazingly well, and others she shoots for the stars and falls back to low Earth orbit. But that's better than most actors.

All in all, it kept me from being totally bored when I wasn't reading, writing, or working my part-time job. But given the choice, I'd much rather go hiking or discover a new author to keep my mind busy. I doubt I'll bother to stream the series next season. (I will assume there will be a next season.)

"Mr. Wednesday." Oh my! Who could he really be?!