American Gods is one of the most beautiful, confusing shows on TV

Starz’s American Gods erupts onscreen in gushes of blood and sex and storms that crack the sky wide open. It spans centuries, with the camera panning across deserts and rooftops, gaudy casino floors and sprawling constellations. Its characters — deities or otherwise — wink and beguile, snark and swallow people whole.

The result is a treat to watch. But man, it can also be a really confusing ride.

It’s been 16 years since Neil Gaiman published American Gods, a novel pitting the gods of yore like Odin and Anubis against emerging ones like Technology and Media. As adapted by Michael Green and Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller, Starz’s version is a visual feast stacked with brilliant actors. From Ian McShane to Gillian Anderson to Orlando Jones, everyone onscreen is palpably thrilled by the opportunity to depict towering gods in a modern-day context, in all their might and often lascivious glory.

If you’re like me and haven’t read Gaiman’s iconic source material, the TV series doesn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to catch you up. There will inevitably come a point when — as blood rains from the sky and some god or another intones an ominous missive about death — you’ll squint and realize you have no idea what’s happening.

But that’s okay by American Gods. Having seen four episodes, I think it’s safe to say that the mysteries being explored by the show’s first season are intricate, and that Fuller and Green are in no rush to give away their secrets. This will be frustrating for people watching from week to week, but American Gods is making the bet that you’ll be intrigued enough by what it teases to stick with it — and on that front, it’s probably right.

Much of the show’s vagueness is no doubt purposeful. American Gods largely follows the journey of Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), an ex-con we meet right before he leaves prison — which, as it so happens, turns out to be the same day his wife dies. On his way to her funeral, Shadow meets the quick-witted Mr. Wednesday (McShane) and suddenly finds himself sucked into his otherworldly orbit of with no earthly clue what’s going on. So it’s likely not a coincidence that, right at the moment in the first episode when I found myself ready to give up on trying to parse the story, Shadow turned to the rambling Mr. Wednesday and echoed my thoughts so exactly I almost thought I was hallucinating: “You’re saying all this like I’m supposed to know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Shadow then stumbles into his journey through the world of old gods, new gods, and the in-between spaces they occupy in modern-day America like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. He becomes Mr. Wednesday’s bodyguard because he lacks anything better to do, and fends off the various other gods trying to get his and Wednesday’s attention in a bid to distract his new boss from starting a war.

Along the way, Shadow gets sucked into another dimension by a newer god known as “Technical Boy” (Bruce Langley), a sneering, pompadoured embodiment of a particularly smug subreddit, who promptly tries to lynch him IRL. And when he manages to escape that nightmare, he finds himself in a department store aisle staring at a screen where Lucille Ball — or more accurately, Anderson’s seductive new god Media taking the form of Lucille Ball — tries to lure Shadow away from Wednesday. (As a side note, Anderson is fantastic and frightening as she purrs that Media runs on “time and attention,” which is apparently “better than lamb’s blood” as far as sacrifices go.)

As Mr. Wednesday — who turns out to be an old god whose identity I won’t spoil — goes about trying to prepare for a war between the old guard and the new, Shadow just keeps getting sucked into unholy conflicts, each weirder and bigger than the last. And all the while, Shadow grieves his wife Laura (Emily Browning), and nurses the hot anger rising in him after finding out the car she died in crashed while she was giving her best friend’s husband (Dane Cook) a blow job.

In short: American Gods knows it’s confusing and endlessly strange. But that is, for better and for worse, part of the point.

Even when I didn’t know what was happening on American Gods, I was captivated by its spellbinding imagery and cinematic scope.

It can’t be overstated just how wonderfully lush and weird this show is — which makes some sense, given that it’s about a clash between all-powerful, often-bored deities with nothing to lose. Every god has his or her own aesthetic, which comes through in everything from Media’s crisp pop culture recreations to the Technical Boy’s trippy digitized limo to the dingy kitchen of Slavic goddess Zorya Vechernyaya (Cloris Leachman). When Shadow falls into the clutches of one god or another, we tumble right with him into a whole new world. Sometimes those worlds even include buffalo with flaming eyes! Life is truly a rich tapestry when you’re riding with gods.

But we also get to see these gods in their own elements before, during, and after Shadow Moon’s existence. American Gods’ pilot features a centuries-old Nordic battle, in which desperate men pay tribute to their almighty war god with their own spraying blood. The second episode travels into the belly of a slave ship headed to America, when West African spider god Anansi (Jones) breaks the bad news that black men will never truly be free once they get to where they’re going.

And in the present day, the show occasionally veers off into story sidetracks of gods living life among the plebes, like the saturated glamor of Bilquis (Yetide Badaki). Her part in the overall story is mysterious, but watching her lure lovers into the endless expanse of her own body with filthy talk and a silken smile is so compelling that it hardly seems to matter. (Which, on second thought, is exactly the kind of reaction Bilquis herself is counting on, isn’t it?)

Every frame, costume, and piece of set design on American Gods is carefully chosen, in both its bombastic scenes and in ones as seemingly mundane as when Shadow and Mr. Wednesday drive through the American heartland. You could pause this show at any moment and print the resulting still as a poster — that’s how beautifully rendered it is.

For as fantastically fun as American Gods’ gods can be, the series is at its best when it brings the story a little closer to earth.

Shadow and Mr. Wednesday’s misadventures bring them to the brink of some truly mind-blowing things, but it’s typically more fun to watch them shoot the shit about what it means to really believe in something, or discuss how “white Jesus could stand a little more suffering.” One of the best moments in the show’s first four episodes comes when Mr. Wednesday — who is endlessly magnetic in McShane’s able hands — tells Shadow to take his pick between believing that either “the world is crazy or you are,” which functions both as a fantastically revealing line and a sort of mission statement for the show itself.

And there are other brief interludes of beautiful, bruising humanity between the high-stakes god wars. When humans bump up against beings who wield power beyond their comprehension, they respond with awe and even something like devotion. In one heart-wrenching scene, Shadow stands by his late wife’s grave and weathers the storm of her best friend Audrey (an explosive Betty Gilpin) as she rages with anger and pain.

But it’s not until the fourth episode — which explores the relationship between Shadow and the recently deceased Laura — that American Gods snaps into place and shows exactly what it’s capable of. Seeing Laura without Shadow’s love blinders is a startling shot of reality, especially once Browning makes it clear that Laura wasn’t a beatific angel but a frustrated woman constantly simmering with antsy resentment. By the time her story takes a startling, horrifying turn, it seems so inevitable that you can feel the weight of her misery sitting on your own chest.

Even though Laura didn’t believe in anything before she died, American Gods believes in her story, telling it with compassion and giving it enough room to actually, y’know, be a story rather than just a crazy, visually thrilling moment. And if the show goes on to do the same for even half of its many, many characters, it could be unstoppable.

American Gods premieres Sunday, April 30, at 9 pm on Starz.