Bryan Fullercannot catch a damn break. After cutting his teeth onStar Trek: Voyager, Fuller started creating some of the most inventive series on television, such asDead Like Me,Wonderfalls, andPushing Daisies, all of which were cancelled before he and his creative team got to fully explore the narrative worlds or their underlying thematic ideas. He also wrote and worked as a consulting producer onHeroes, and you can see his fingerprints all over that botches series' best episodes. This is all the more devastating considering just how radical and evocative his longest-running series,Hannibal, ended up being by the end of its third season.
And yet, the unmitigated brilliant he showed there wasn’t enough to save his job at eitherStar Trek: DiscoveryorAmerican Gods, the latter of which was one of the very best seasons of TV to be released last year. Fuller and his longtime collaborator,Michael Green, were fired fromAmerican Godsover budget issues, leading to a long hunt for a replacement showrunner to work with source authorNeil Gaimanon season two. That search ended yesterday, whenJesse Alexanderwas announced as the lead showrunner on the show’s second season. Surprisingly, Alexander is also a Fuller collaborator, having worked onHannibalwith him, as well as a producer onLost,Alias, andHeroes.
The second season ofAmerican Godswas originally expected to premiere in early 2019, but the search for a showrunner has likely put that back to at least summer 2019, if not fall. Regardless, one should not lose hope thatAmerican Godswill remain as satisfying and ambitious in its second season. Fuller and Green already penned half of the season before being fired from the project, so at least the general narrative will continue to explore sex, religion, romance, death, familial relations, and the metaphysical with the same wild abandon that made the first season so riveting. The imagery might not be quite as inventive or cleverly revealing, butAmerican Godswill survive for now, which is all good news on this end.
