American Gods TV Series: Neil Gaiman Expected To Write Some of It, Anansi Boys Concepts Are Fair Game

Characters and concepts from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys could come into play in showrunner Bryan Fuller's Starz series based on Gaiman's American Gods, Fuller revealed during an interview that ran today.

The series will likely start shooting in late 2015 with an eye toward being on TV in 2016. Fuller is also currently serving as a writer and producer on NBC's Hannibal.

"It's basically the following the events of the books but expanding those events, and expanding the point of view to go above and beyond [main characters] Shadow and Wednesday," Fuller told Crave Online of American Gods. "In that way, as with Game of Thrones, there are dozens of characters that you're tracking through the events and that's probably the biggest similarities between the worlds, in that there's a wide variety of characters at play."

He also revealed that Gaiman is involved in the development of the series on a close level and, when asked whether the best-selling novelist and comic book writer would pen an episode or two, he said "He'd g--damn well better."

He also confirmed that the rights package to pick up the film also included characters and concepts from Anansi Boys, which is set in the same universe as American Gods.

 "Since Anansi Boys are in the world of American Gods – that we would be allowed to use those as well," Fuller said simply.

The project has been in development for years -- sometimes as a movie, sometimes at HBO, where it presumably started to draw the comparisons to their flagship series Game of Thrones as describe above.