Showrunner Jesse Alexander ‘fired but not fired’ from American Gods

So he’s fired

Does anyone even know what’s happening with American Gods anymore? Every time I hear about the series, it’s never anything positive. First, we learned that Bryan Fuller and Michael Green were dropped due to “creative differences”, and now we’ve just found out that the new showrunner is being fired, except not really. Jesse Alexander isn’t allowed to edit, make any more decisions on, or even be on set for the remainder of the production. That sounds like being fired to me. 

But it gets juicer, my friends. So much juicer. 

Apparently, the show has been through production hell for the past year after Fuller’s departure. Alexander was hired on to be the showrunner, with Neil Gaiman himself, the original author of American Gods, selecting Alexander as the new showrunner. After being hired, Alexander threw out six scripts originally written by Fuller and Green in favor of scripts that aligned the series more with the books. However, there have been several arguments between Starz, Freemantle, the production company behind American Gods, and Gaiman himself over the direction of the series. 

Then there’s the fact that the show is six weeks behind schedule with no script completed for the final episode. Alexander turned in multiple scripts for the season 2 finale, but all of them were rejected. So the production is now on hiatus with the cast shooting pickups and reshoots of earlier episodes instead of working on the finale. The finale that does not exist. Oh, and it seems like someone was brought in the replace Alexander but they jumped ship almost immediately after seeing how troubled the production was. 

This is a real shame, the first season of American Gods wasn’t perfect but it had a lot of interesting ideas and characters that sold me. The first season laid a lot of groundwork that one would expect to be explored in future seasons, but man does this really bum me out about the show. The show is hemorrhaging money too, so it’s going to take a lot of magic to make the second season profitable, even after all of this negativity.

Currently, the season has no release date, but it’s expected to return sometime in 2019. 

Americans Gods Drops Season 2 Showrunner Amid Behind The Scenes Turmoil [IGN]