Neil Gaiman has become a novelist with an enormous following, and it would seem to be fairly natural that a company like HBO would tackle one of his books. And so it was with American Gods, but the project ultimately folded with nary a frame shot. And it turns out, there was good reason.
No, it wasn’t Gaiman being a prima donna. Instead, HBO’s president of programming admitted to Vulture that he dropped it because nobody could write a script worth shooting.
I think we’re all huge fans of the book, and I think the script just didn’t — we couldn’t craft the script as good as we needed it to be. We tried three different writers, we put a lot of effort into it. We have to trust at the end of the day, if you don’t have a star with a great script, you’re just not going to go through with it.
We have to admit, that took a while to wrap our heads around. So, HBO couldn’t find a good script for the show… they invested all this money in it… and they ate that money rather than make a subpar product? Wow, it’s almost like they actually care about what they put on the air!
American Gods is still in the works, at least as of February, but it’s nice to know that HBO would rather let a book go than put out one season of a crappy series. Maybe other networks should take note, instead of assuming it’s the boobs that sell Game of Thrones?