Some Thoughts on Episode 1 of American Gods

• The look is quite different from what I'd imagined. Gaiman's book was marketed as "better than Stephen King or your money back" and that was more or less how I'd pictured the visuals. For that matter, Stephen King is more or less the only popular author nowadays who still writes about an America that Hillary Clinton (to her cost) refused to believe still existed. What better place for the Old Gods to carry on existing, where people believe (albeit less and less as time goes by), than flyover country? Only outsiders like Gaiman still dare to venture to such a place - which is genuinely sad, because the people who live there are (in their own way) genuinely splendid.
• Shadow in the book is "mixed race", In the series he appears to be just a stereotypical whining black man, which is unfortunate. By making him mixed race Gaiman both held up to scrutiny a Marxist vision of America the "melting-pot" and implicitly queried its validity in a stubbornly multicultural world. (This was before 9/11!) What gods, indeed, does a "mixed race" man worship? At the same time, he gleefully subverted the standard "magic negro" trope so familiar from King's prison drama The Green Mile (for example). Shadow is a "black" man, but he's almost the only character in the story who doesn't have magic powers.
• Obviously it's always difficult to transfer a cerebral type of hero, with internal monologues and long descriptive observations and angst, from the page to the screen, but even so, Shadow in the book is much more likeable than he is in the TV-version.
• The idea that female flight attendants are like völvas or Valkyries actually played out clearer and funnier in the TV-series than it did in the book, though arguably that was just a function of the executive producer source material-author (i.e. Gaiman himself) seeing that the more "important" jokes from his work got transferred over to the screen version properly.
• In the late '80s Ian McShane was Lovejoy, a smug wide-boy antiques dealer who ran rings round the yuppy denizens of London's home counties whilst getting off with the daughters of the minor aristocracy. The last time I saw him he was a special guest star (one episode only) playing a smug fantasy trendy vicar in Game of Thrones. And instead of playing Prof Merriman Lyon from The Dark is Rising Sequence (the tall, ancient, kindly, otherworldly Great Uncle Merry character from the books), in the film version of The Dark is Rising he played a smug and wonderfully violent butler. And now here he is playing a smug conman version of Mr Wednesday that is nothing like the Creepy Col Sanders character from the book. But that is perhaps permissible and (more to the point) more enjoyable on telly. And an Englishman playing an American character for once works rather well, given that Mr Wednesday is, of course, not "really" American. 
• The mindless violence is surprisingly unnecessary, as are the four-letter words. Some things have been unnecessarily coarsened, others surprisingly bowdlerised. Making Bilquis into an internet date rather than a hooker was a disappointing example of the latter. Americans even after Game of Thrones still seemingly can't deal with a character who practices the world's oldest profession.
• And on the subject of Bilquis, was she supposed to be beautiful? Was the point that she isn't but men still desire her? Or was she supposed to look younger and more beautiful at the end of her scene than she did at the beginning? In the book Bilquis had brown hands, and even in the script she has a cherry red mouth. But in our modern Marxist dualist (or post-modern) western culture, where it doesn't matter what things look like (q.v. Lily Potter's eyes in the last Harry Potter film!), and, more to the point, in an American popular culture that currently only recognises two races as authentically "American", she has to be played by a black actress.
• On the one hand it feels hammy, over the top, shiny and slightly gaudy. On the other, it feels low budget, much like Auntie's current Doctor Who (or their dreary version of SS-GB, come to that). Miscasting can make a show feel just as cheap as shabby sets and poor dialogue can, and more specifically the problem with racial miscasting (so far Shadow and Bilquis are the most obvious, though of course McShane too is an odd racial fit, given that he doesn't look particularly Nordic) is that American Gods implicitly is all about characters from different races and cultures who, having come to America, are trying to reconcile what they are and where they're from with the world of today. With a casting director who doesn't care where people are from, either ethnically or (implicitly) geographically and "religiously", the show has arguably got off on the wrong foot.
• All-in-all though, the whole thing is watchable, nay enjoyable. Early episode weirdness can be quickly ironed out, and provided it carries on being fresh and inventive it should keep its audience until the end.