For Fans of American Gods

American Gods argues that the New Gods -- Media, Technology, the Intangible World -- won the moment the last immigrant generation stopped lighting candles to the old powers. Wednesday's whole crusade is a grift, not a victory march. The series earns its melancholy by treating forgotten belief as a kind of grief: for origin stories, for the names people carried across oceans. Shadow Moon works as a protagonist precisely because he arrives empty, a man with nothing to believe in who becomes a vessel for everyone else's faith.

Shadow Moon is written as a near-blank -- present, watchful, absorbing. That is a risky casting call, and Ricky Whittle carries it by physicality and restraint rather than verbal dazzle. The series builds its real pyrotechnics around him: Ian McShane's Odin is a magnificent con-man monologue machine; Yetide Badaki's Bilquis and Pablo Schreiber's Mad Sweeney are the show's emotional extremes. Shadow's stillness is the gravity around which all that chaos orbits.

Good Omens (co-written by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett) covers parallel territory: ancient supernatural forces forced to navigate the mundane modern world, divine bureaucracies that have lost the plot, and an apocalypse nobody actually wants. Where American Gods is steeped in immigrant grief and American loneliness, Good Omens runs warm and British and absurdist. Both the Pratchett/Gaiman novel and the Prime Video series are essential reads and watches for anyone who responded to Gaiman's mythology-as-everyday-life frequency.