Just watched the first couple of episodes. Rather more erect or otherwise uncovered penises then myself and Mrs. WmA are accustomed to seeing on our television of an evening, but a very powerful opening to the series. Ian McShane playing the part without adopting a USian accent - except sometimes, which is odd. Maybe it's simply because of how long he's spent over there.

Curious that it's American Gods but Neil Gaiman is British as are the two lead characters. Emily Browning is Australian, Pablo Schreiber is Canadian, Bruce Langley is British and so on, and so on, leaving only about 15% of the cast being properly USian.

Well, McShane is playing the part of Odin, so what accent should he have? Recall the Viking scene, where they plant a graven image of Odin on the NA coast to summon favorable winds for their escape? That's his locus 'origin story'. I think the idea is that America is the place where disparate religions, personified by their deities, duke it out with 'gods of the modern worlds' (consumerism, technology), and the ancient deities are modeled (quite accurately IMO) on their founding mythologies as we now understand them. So e.g. they are possessed by human mores and motivations, form and dissolve alliances based on false promises and real threats, and like to 'fuck with' ordinary humans (as the leprechaun put it), either as proxies or purely for sport. That's a conceptual framework -- the details as the story unfolds are a bit different.

> Curious that it's American Gods but Neil Gaiman is British as are the two lead characters ... leaving only about 15% of the cast being properly USian.

It's presumably American Gods because Neil felt that was the best setting for the story he wanted to tell. Neil being British is irrelevant. He has described it as being a book about immigrants, so it's entirely appropriate to have multiple nationalities reflected in the cast.

And yet your 15% statistic is more than a tad inaccurate:

If you want to be racist you can go ahead and exclude people that moved to American as children - just because Pablo Schreiber and Yetide_Badaki have both lived, studied and worked in the country for over 25 years, they're clearly not proper USians. Here's the pie chart that puts them entirely where they belong:

That puts it at 48% of proper Americans playing the significant characters. In a series based on a book about immigrants. Very curious.

Peter, I made the mistake of reading your response before setting off on my walk this morning with the result that my thoughts were engaged on it for far longer than they should have been: nearly the entire 12 kilometres. I missed the moment of sunrise, forgot to take a photograph of the fishing boat (they won't be back for a week now) and worst of all, I didn't say 'good morning' to the elderly lady who walks 'Bobby'. I had to hurry back to her and apologise. We had quite a nice chat however, and I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that I'm feeling far more relaxed after that.

Two guys with OCD walk into a bar...

Just so :)
 

Are "proper" Americans of Native extraction? How diluted is that allowed to be? How deep should this rabbit-hole go? (my vote is for no further at all, thanks)

I bet Neil Gaiman's been living in the USA for years and years by now as well.

Exactly. It isn't a rabbit hole that I would ever step into.

I've got a Neil Gaiman novel that isn't autographed. I'm hanging on to it on the basis that its rarity will make it collectable in future.

Does he routinely autograph everything published, so this is the equivalent of an uncancelled Penny Black?

Bah! What does a guy have to do to get a decent flamewar going these days? :@

Don't bring a bic lighter to a blowtorch fight.

Absolutely. In addition to his endless official book-signings, he apparently has a habit of signing them unasked when he's in bookshops.

Damn. I wouldn't have stolen the library copy if I'd known it's the unsigned ones that are rare.

The new series has begun!

It's alright, I think. There's only been one episode, so far. I spent most of it going "who's that again? Oh, yeah, i think I remember, maybe. Hm." and apart from that I'm not really sure what was going on. The old gods are a bit fed up and fractured? The new ones are really pissed off? There's gonna be a right old set to? They had some nice Viking beach visuals, anyway, and I want to go visit the House on the Rock now.

It's had some problems apparently. As long as Ian McShane is still on board.

Heh! We were OK picking up the threads because we binge-watched the first series not that long ago. No idea why, but we hadn't realised that Season 3 of the Expanse was available on Prime and having watched 1 & 2 on Netflix so long ago we were totally at sea. Mrs WilliamA couldn't follow it at all so we stopped and watched 2 again on Prime and then because she was still having problems we then watched 1 again as well. Hope Season 4 isn't too far off. 

But yeah, AG episode 1 was good. My only disappointment was that I wasn't paying attention to the announcement of the season starting and somehow got the idea that they'd posted all episodes - which was a bit disappointing. 

Some people are saying that the problems are "the curse of Fuller" since so many great series that Bryan Fuller works on are started, build an audience, get pulled. 

Some have had a lengthy run, but there do seem to be a fair few, including some I liked. Dead Like Me springs to mind - one of my all-time favourites.

is it good? I am about to start it. 

I still don't really know what the point of this series is so far. Seems like a series of disconnected scenes that aren't quite as visually cool as the first set, but nothing's really progressing anywhere in the main plot. I suppose it oughta get somewhere soon, right?