DP has the subscription but is a bit peculiar about it being shared (Old age or something...) so I've c&p the Good omens part of the article as it won't save properly on Internet archive or 12ft.io
The book of Good Omens, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman way back in 1990, is perhaps my favourite book of all the books there are. It has the wit of Pratchett without his occasionally cloying tweeness, and the cool of Gaiman without his hipster self-satisfaction. I love it. So when Amazon finally adapted it for television in 2019, I was angsty as hell.
The original Good Omens, you see, begins with a farcical switcheroo by which the Antichrist, intended to be deposited as a cuckoo with the American ambassador, instead ends up being brought up in the picturesque English village of Lower Tadfield. As such, it was intended by the authors to be a double parody: of the horror film franchise of The Omen, which began in 1976, and the Just William novels by Richmal Crompton, published between 1922 and 1970. Or, as your modern-day streaming audiences might put it, “The, uh, what and the what?” So all that was ditched.
Another, bigger, problem was that the core humour of the book was one of globally provincial bathos; the absurdity of apocalyptic events that belong in big, glamorous, important places (the biblical Holy Land, the United States of Goddamn America, etc) instead happening just down the road from somewhere like Amersham. I don’t recall that Pratchett and Gaiman specifically have a Beast crawling up out of the sea, but if they had done, it would probably have been making landfall next to an ice-cream van and covered in toilet paper. And, for reasons beyond the scope of this column, I’m just not sure that the general vibe — of stifled, embarrassed, uncool, late-20th-century British crapness, basically — made a lot of sense come 2019. So that was all ditched too.
Michael Sheen and David Tennant in Good Omens
MARK MAINZ/PRIME VIDEO
As a result, at least for me, the first series of Good Omens (Prime Video) was a bit weird. Also, in the book, the relationship between the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale — each betraying their respective sides by trying to save the world — is one dynamic among many. Here, it became the main deal, not least because of the chemistry between David Tennant and Michael Sheen, who respectively play the two of them. Originally, of course, even their dynamic was a parody, partly of Cold War spies (“Cold what, now?” says 2019) and partly of the two authors. Now it was just a couple of men, sort of flirting.
After all that, though, it was not actually bad. It just lacked magic, perhaps as a result of feeling an obligation to stick dutifully to the events of the core text while jettisoning the rationale for them. Having done this, right the way to the thwarted apocalypse with which the book ends, series two has no original work to draw upon. Funnily enough, this makes it an altogether less stressful affair.
Crowley and Aziraphale are still supernatural beings resident on Earth, but both have been fired. One morning, the angel Gabriel (a brilliant Jon Hamm) turns up at Aziraphale’s Soho rare books shop, naked and suffering from amnesia. Heaven and Hell alike are seeking him, for reasons that our heroes reckon must be alarming. So, they shelter him. Meanwhile, along the road, the record shop owner Maggie (Maggie Service) has fallen in love with the coffee shop owner Nina (Nina Sosanya). For reasons I’ll leave you to learn on your own, angel and demon end up invested in their relationship. You may recall that Service and Sosanya were in the previous series too, as satanic nuns. These characters are not explicitly connected, but in a remade world after an apocalypse that wasn’t, it’s still a nice touch.
● David Tennant: Stop demonising Good Omens
We’re also blessed with a few flashbacks, of Aziraphale and Crowley collaborating through the biblical ages. Most of these are about Aziraphale’s doubt. At creation, he frets about the godly morality of making a whole universe that could last for billions of years and planning to shut it all down after six millennia just because of events that have happened on one tiny part of it. Later, he worries about the deaths of Job’s children, slain by God to win an argument with Satan.
All of this is cleverer than it seems. One of the funniest things about this new Good Omens is its portrayal of Heaven as a cold place, good only in a tribal sense and full of angels who are blithe and naive about the reality of human suffering. Aziraphale and Crowley, by contrast, have gone native and become humanitarians. As a result, Good Omens manages to be a broadside against religion in general while also being intensely, and perhaps even covertly, Christian. Dwelling on Earth — as I gather some other chap is supposed to have done — our angel and demon represent a faith revolutionised by the concepts of love and forgiveness set against a dogmatic Old Testament backdrop that has not yet grasped either.
Philosophically, though, it’s hardly The Good Place. Good Omens on screen was never going to delight me as the book did, and it’s inevitably saddening to see it reduced to something so episodic and Sherlock-esque. Gaiman, who is the show’s key writer (Pratchett died in 2015), has suggested that a third series is on the way and that it will incorporate ideas that he and Pratchett dreamt up for a second book they never wrote. He’s probably talking about plot, though, which was never the point. Or at least, not for me. Probably I should just stop grumbling and enjoy the damn thing for what it is. When it’s a book that cleaves to your soul, though, you never quite can.