American Gods picked up by Starz – Yet Another Website

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods picked up by Starz for TV series adaptation

Cable network to develop adaptation of novel, with Bryan Fuller and Michael Green as showrunners, after HBO abandons project

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is being adapted into a television series by Starz, the premium US cable network announced on Tuesday.

HBO was developing a project based on the award-winning series until November of last year, when the project changed hands to FremantleMedia in February. Gaiman said at the time of the announcement “that it already looks like it’s going to be a smoother run developing it than it had at HBO, so I am very pleased.”

Starz gave the project a script to series development and said it will create a series that honors the book.

The showrunners are Bryan Fuller, of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies, and Michael Green, of The River and Heroes, who are also writing the pilot.

“Neil Gaiman has created the holiest of holy toy boxes with American Gods and filled it with all manner of magical thing, born of new gods and old,” Fuller said in a statement. “Michael Green and I are thrilled to crack this toy box wide open and unleash the fantastical titans of heaven and earth and Neil’s vividly prolific imagination.”

The series follows ex-con Shadow in modern-day United States as a war brews between old and new gods.

“When you create something like American Gods, which attracts fans and obsessives and people who tattoo quotes from it on themselves or each other, and who all, tattooed or not, just care about it deeply, it’s really important to pick your team carefully: you don’t want to let the fans down, or the people who care and have been casting it online since the dawn of recorded history,” Gaiman said in a statement. “What I love most about the team who I trust to take it out to the world, is that they are the same kind of fanatics that American Gods has attracted since the start.”

Gaiman’s Anansi Boys is also in early-development to become a BBC mini-series.

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BRYAN FULLER TALKS NEIL GAIMAN, AMERICAN GODS, AND ITS GAME OF THRONES CONNECTION

Oh Bryan Fuller, you mad television genius, you. As if we weren’t already tickled by his small screen endeavors — the brilliant Hannibal being chief among them at the moment — the prolific writer/producer/doer-of-all-things has also undertaken the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed novel, American Gods, hopefully coming to Starz in the near future.

It’s a move that’s both excited and terrified fans of Gaiman’s novel and Fuller’s work in general. But if anyone could pull off such an expansive and impressive story with visual aplomb, surely it is the man who invented the wendingo.

Speaking with the author, Crave Online got the scoop of the series’ anticipated trajectory, in addition to tidbits about the involvement of Gaiman and whether or not the series will deviate (and to what degree) from the book’s original story line.

First thing’s first — don’t expect this one right away. In fact, don’t expect it next year, either. “If it does go [to series],” Fuller explained in the interview, “it would start filming sometime mid-to-late 2015 and probably wouldn’t be on anybody’s television until 2016.”

No doubt chief of the concerns amongst readers of Gaiman’s source material is the question of just how loyal the series would be to the story he told, Fuller compared his endeavor — at least in terms of characters — to HBO’s epic series to end all epic series, Game Of Thrones. “It’s basically the following the events of the books but expanding those events, and expanding the point of view to go above and beyond [main characters] Shadow and Wednesday. In that way, as with Game of Thrones, there are dozens of characters that you’re tracking through the events and that’s probably the biggest similarities between the worlds, in that there’s a wide variety of characters at play.”

But Fuller has more to work with, event and character-wise, given that American Gods also has a follow-up novel, Anansi Boys, from which to cull from and create further storytelling from. He confirmed as much in the interview. “Since Anansi Boys are in the world of American Gods – that we would be allowed to use those as well.”

And, perhaps the biggest question on people’s minds? How involved will Neil Gaiman be in the day-to-day of the series’ creation? “Neil’s executive producing and he’s very involved,” explained Fuller. “He is absolutely integral to the process and also very excited just to see it coming together in the fashion that it is.”

It’s no surprise, really, considering Gaiman’s recent foray into epic storytelling thanks to his episodic writing on BBC’s Doctor Who. His two episodes, “The Doctor’s Wife” and “Nightmare in Silver” were particular highlights in each of their respective seasons. Which, of course, begs the most potentially epic question of all: Will Gaiman write any episodes himself?

“He’d better,” joked Fuller. “He’d god damn well better.”

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