Like Avengers: Age of Ultron or Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, it has a plot so baffling only weird life forms (11-year-old boys, swivel-eyed lawyers) could explain or care about.īut McShane is above such confusion, now and throughout his career. Which is why McShane was in a parking lot in Nowheresville USA, sweet-talking Kali.Īmerican Gods is like a Marvel or DC franchise with theological pretensions. His team so far includes Ghanaian trickster god Anansi, with his gobby patter and sharp suits, and Queen Bilquis, goddess of love and cleavages. But only if Mr Wednesday can recruit more members to his crack crew of tooled-up immortals. The immigrant gods from Europe, Asia and Africa are to be arrayed at some point this season against the new order imagined by writer Neil Gaiman as veiled approximations of Zuckerberg, Bezos and the spirit of Steve Jobs.

His task is to rouse depressed gods who were worshipped before the neoliberal digital era and fight to restore the glory days.

Wagnerians will recognise Mr Wednesday by his single eye, stirring bass vocals and unkindness to ravens as Wotan, Valhalla’s uber ruler. This will not stand.Īnd so it falls to Ian McShane, as Mr Wednesday, to take out the parvenu god trash. The US has been seduced by a gimcrack pantheon of new deities: globalisation (personified by Mr World), technology (represented by a god called Technical Boy) and pop culture (symbolised by the goddess Media, played by Gillian Anderson in season one but now, following backstage shenanigans we will address shortly, by someone else). Why on earth is Mama-Ji AKA Kali, Hindu goddess of death, destruction and, fingers crossed, excellent waffles, busting her hump at a diner? Because in American Gods (Amazon Prime) the old gods have fallen on hard times: nobody believes in them any more, so they have been obliged to join the precariat. “That is, if I can swap my weekend shift.”

‘I have no choice but to resume the lopping of heads and the drinking of blood,” sighed Mama-Ji, a waitress at the Motel America with the understandable weariness of someone steeling themselves for the martial fuss of a franchise’s second season.

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