Kevin's Watch

Tom Hanks’ Playtone Productions is set to produce an open-ended series, American Gods, for HBO, based on Neil Gaiman’s award-winning novel....

The series-in-development, revolving around the question “are you a god if no one believes in you?” is executive produced by Goetzman and Hanks, with Bob Richardson, and Gaiman on board as executive producer and writer.

Now slated for six seasons, each season will be of 10-12, hour-long episodes with a budget of around $35-40 million per season, targeted to debut on the cable powerhouse in 2013 at the earliest.

Salman Rushdie is to make a sci-fi television series in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories.

"It's like the best of both worlds," said the novelist in an interview with the Observer. "You can work in movie style productions, but have proper control."

The new work, to be called The Next People is being made for Showtime, a US cable TV network. The plot will be based in factual science, Rushdie said, but will contain elements of the supernatural or extra-terrestrial. Although filming is yet to begin, a pilot has been commissioned and written. It will have what Rushdie described as "an almost feature-film budget".

It's a big year for Neil Gaiman's American Gods. There's a fancy anniversary edition, "updated and expanded with the author's preferred text." There's the promise of a big-budget TV adaptation. And most of all, a long-awaited sequel on the way.

So we were excited to be able to talk to Gaiman about the tenth anniversary of his novel. How has a bumpy decade for America affected the series? What gods and what characters might appear in later books? And are those six seasons of television going to come from? Here's what he told us.