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Positive:
33
Mixed:
15
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
May 1, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The conscientious visual style that Fuller honed on “Hannibal” achieves riotous new heights of sensuality in this series. Green, a DC Comics veteran whose television credits include serving as an executive producer on “Heroes,” aids in harmonizing the story’s surfeit of histories and personalities into an intelligible and spellbinding structure.
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RogerEbert.comApr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
American Gods will be an overload of personality for some people. And yet there’s more powerful, memorable ideas and images in these first four episodes than most shows contain in their entire runs. It’s a series that defies traditional description or viewing. As Anderson’s character says to Shadow Moon, “Don’t fight gravity.” This show is gravity.
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Apr 27, 2017
Season 1 Review:
While the four episodes presented to critics for preview offered just enough bearings to determine that bearings are of limited use in the universe of American Gods, it’s safe to say even this early that it’s one of the most imaginative, adventurous, and deeply weird experiments on television--an entrancingly trippy metaphorical melee that elevates an investigation of American identity to a supernatural plane.
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Apr 17, 2017
Season 1 Review:
[Bryan Fuller and Michael Green have] blended their sensibilities, weaving a rich tapestry of whimsy, epic action, and deft characterization. Practically speaking, it will definitely tide you over until that other fantasy drama returns. But thematically, it could knock someone off their throne.
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May 1, 2017
Season 1 Review:
American Gods is a bit too packed with these intriguing jaunts, and the narrative sometimes feels like it will run out of gas long before reaching its destination. (The first 8-episode season reportedly covers only the first third of the fantasy epic.) But that doesn't mean you won't enjoy the ride.
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Radio TimesDec 2, 2021
Season 3 Review:
There’s a real sense, after the first four hours, that everything is coming together to reveal just what Shadow’s destiny is and a feeling that the story strands are all heading in the same direction. While season two felt like a chore, early indications are that season three will be well worth the ride.
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The TelegraphJan 11, 2021
Season 3 Review:
The show initially had simply too much of everything: too much sex, too much violence, to many weird flashbacks to the gods’s glory years across human history. Series three is where the fever belatedly breaks and everyone involved takes deep breath. Oh miracle of miracles, American Gods may finally be watchable.
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May 1, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The result is a wonderfully eclectic mix of gory bloodlust and fairy whimsy, ethereal beauty and tenement apartment realism. Special effects are masterfully used throughout American Gods to thrust viewers into alternate dimensions or let us know something otherworldly is about to happen. And when American Gods does get all supernatural, it’s beautiful.
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May 1, 2017
Season 1 Review:
American Gods is deliberately disjointed, like tracks on an album. There are times when the show seems more interested in parsing ephemeral moments in the here-and-now than contemplating the big issues. The more beguiling moments involve bits of what might be called barroom philosophy, such as Shadow Moon saying that “all the best drinks have self-defining names,” or Media lamenting people’s increasing inability to concentrate on one thing at a time.
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Apr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Joining McShane and Whittle, such stars as Cloris Leachman, Peter Stormare, Emily Browning, Pablo Schreiber, and others contribute their immeasurable talents. They play their roles expertly, carrying the show's allure and mystery while humanizing their otherworldly characters.
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Apr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
If you’re willing to wait for the story to take shape, there are compensations. The action hums along, even if you can’t tell where it’s going, and there’s a welcome edge of humor (not abundant in this genre), especially in the performances of Mr. McShane and Pablo Schreiber.
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Apr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Weird and mesmerizing. ... You can feel elements of other programs in this series, but it's also unique in the television landscape. But it's not always an easy show to watch, and not just because of the blood and the body count. You've got to be patient, because Fuller & Co. unspool this story slowly.
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Apr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
To be fair to the actor [Ricky Whittle], the script doesn’t give him all that much to work with early on, and Shadow will eventually become more than just Wednesday’s bodyguard. American Gods is a long, slow burn, but if it stays so true to the novel it’s based on, the bang, when it comes, will be unforgettable.
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Apr 29, 2017
Season 1 Review:
A rambunctious sci-fi/fantasy slice-and-dice of theology, myth, and hot-button sociology, with a generous dollop of pure depravity thrown in just for fun and Nielsen points, American Gods is a dizzying journey through humanity's obsession with theism and dogma. It doesn't always make sense--maybe it never makes sense--and its pace is dreadfully uneven. But a show in which a religious pilgrim trekking through the wilderness of a big-box electronic store is tempted by a goddess disguised as Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, murmuring from a TV screen, "Hey, you ever wanted to see Lucy's tits?" is not easily dismissed.
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Apr 27, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Whittle’s role feels slightly underwritten in the first half of the season, but he’s an attractive, empathetic hero, a strong man who is smarter than he looks. And McShane is a pleasure to hear, biting into dialogue with the same enormous vigor and skill he brought to Deadwood. Together, they’re taking us on a road trip with no destination or clear purpose in sight. But the scenery is startling and the company’s great. And for fans of the book or Fuller, that is likely to be enough.
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Apr 17, 2017
Season 1 Review:
It takes until Episode 3 for everything to gel fully, and that wait may feel interminable to those who haven’t read the book and can’t anticipate what’s ahead. Viewers who are familiar with the work, however, will be happy to know that the novel’s interstitial segments--which offer snapshots of gods at work in the lives of ordinary people--not only have survived the adaptation but provide some of the richest moments in the first part of the season.
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Apr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The eight-episode first season of American Gods takes about four episodes to cohere, especially for any viewers unfamiliar with the novel. ... Mostly it is Mr. McShane’s performance that carries the early episodes. His Mr. Wednesday is self-assured, charming and cutthroat all at once.
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Apr 28, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Gods has its own dark humor--as when the erratic widow of Shadow’s best friend tries to have sex with him in a cemetery. “I’m trying to get my dignity back here,” she says. Gods takes delight in magnifying images hundredfold--a match being struck, a tile being cleaned. This can get a bit precious.
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May 1, 2017
Season 1 Review:
The eight-episode show fantasia of ancient mythology and Americana is gorgeously conceived, vastly imaginative, and ludicrously over the top. It also unfortunately falls sway to the worst, most self-indulgent excesses of prestige television, namely terrible pacing, prodigal violence, and a thuddingly unsubtle score that often feels better suited to a high-budget porn film.
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TV Guide MagazineApr 27, 2017
Season 1 Review:
Visually spectacular but initially lumbering series adaptation. [1-14 May 2017, p.18]
Apr 25, 2017The PlaylistJan 3, 2021
Season 3 Review:
“American Gods” this season feels more confident overall and more entertaining on a scene-by-scene basis, but it still slips through one’s fingers if they try to see the complete picture of what this show is trying to be. It seems too content to meander from episode to episode, allowing for the aforementioned philosophical mumbo jumbo when it needs to be building momentum.
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The GuardianDec 3, 2019
Mar 5, 2019
Season 2 Review:
Gaiman’s a hell of a writer. Even with Anderson and Chenoweth gone, this is still a striking and deep ensemble. But the whole thing is hollow and dull. Fuller and Green’s vision of American Gods was far from perfect throughout, but it could be stunning in isolated moments or episodes, where the new season offers very little to believe in.
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Apr 27, 2017
Season 1 Review:
While the heavily stylized sex and violence can look beautiful, it’s often just as grim and ponderous as the dialogue and pacing. Only late in the fourth episode does the story begin to coalesce, but by that point it’s likely that anyone who wasn’t a fan to begin with will have long since tuned out.
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