Good Omens is a Truly Delightful Apocalypse
*Abandon all hope ye who enter here and wish to avoid spoilers
When my friend Danver told me, over eight months ago, that there was going to be a mini-series adaptation of the novel Good Omens and it would star David Tennant as Crowley I got so incredibly excited. I love the book and David Tennant is such a good actor. The casting told me they would do the book justice. Last Friday, the wait was finally over. Good Omens dropped on Amazon Prime, and it was a truly delightful series to watch.
If you need context: Good Omens is a novel that was cowritten by Neil Gaiman and the late great Terry Pratchett, and published in 1990. The plot is that the Anti-Christ is alive and well on Earth but was misplaced as a baby and raised as a normal English kid. An angel and a demon who are old friends team up to find him and stop the apocalypse.
I’m not one of those fans who will always say “the book is better.” Admittedly it often is, but there are plenty of times where it works, and a few where the movie is better the books. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is my all-time favorite film and it is way better than the books. Sorry not sorry Tolkien. I’m open to adaptations. And this one I felt would be particularly well-done especially since Neil Gaiman was the showrunner for the series.
The main, and, honestly, excellent significant change between the book and the show was the shift in focus. The book focuses on primarily on Adam, the Anti-Christ, with Aziraphale, the angel, and Crowley, the demon, as important but supporting characters. The show flips it. The main characters and the focus of the entire show is Aziraphale and Crowley, and their relationship. Adam is more of a McGuffin than a character.
But this makes sense from a TV show perspective. Why focus on a random 12-year old actor when you have incredible adult ones at your fingertips? It’s more interesting and just better viewing to be honest. And while David Tennant’s Crowley is absolutely pitch-perfect, Michael Sheen is also excellent as Aziraphale. He is fussy and British and somewhat overwrought at all times. And Jon Hamm played Gabriel, who went from a cameo in the book to a solid supporting character in the TV show. You play to your strengths and for Good Omens, that strength is the actors and the extremely fun relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley.
Here is the best way to describe how much I loved them: when I finished the series, I wanted to immediately go back and rewatch it with only their scenes. Honestly, I might just do that in the near future anyway. Their dynamic is wonderful. They are quite different temperamentally (angel and demon after all) but also clearly the most important people in each other’s lives. The show did seem to waffle between them being friends or a couple. It kind of went back and forth, with other angels at one point referring to Crowley as Aziraphale’s boyfriend along with others. And although Crowley refers to Aziraphale as his best friend, he also says they should run away together. I personally put their relationship status as “it’s complicated.”
There were a couple things that did bug me. I haven’t read the novel Good Omens in a few years, but the show matched it so well that I could anticipate not just the events, but knew precisely how certain scenes would transpire. Sometimes that was fun, but with the side characters I was less invested in, it was often annoying.
The structural thing I took issue with was the narration. Narration is all well and good and was necessary in this show in a number of parts. And it was very clever that they made the narrator, voiced by Frances McDormand, God. But the narration was overused throughout the series. There was one scene in particular, when Crowley is dealing with his houseplants. The vast majority of the narration in that scene is entirely superfluous, and I think the scene would have landed better if it had just been the acting. Also, much of the narration was word-for-word the same as the novel. Which is great when you get to hear a particularly witty line, but irritated me because I knew exactly what the narrator was going to say for the majority of the series. I never thought I’d say it but there is such a thing as hewing too closely to the book in question.
Random delightful bits
In both the show and the book Pestilence was replaced by Pollution as the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. It’s even more apropos now than it was when the book came out. The actress who played Pollution, and the way the show framed the concepts, were minor, but very enjoyable.
In one scene a soldier is reading American Gods, the acclaimed novel by, of course, Neil Gaiman. Well played.
Pepper. I didn’t know I needed to see an eleven-year-old girl denouncing war as a product of toxic masculinity, but I definitely did.
All the awkward conversations by the characters when going through immigration at Heathrow.
Using Queen in the soundtrack. The novel specifically says that all cassette tapes turn into The Best of Queen if they spend too long in Crowley’s car. So in the TV show, every time Crowley is driving, Queen is playing.
If you couldn’t tell, I adored this show. It’s not my Favorite Thing Ever, and I know the novel too well for the plot to surprise me in any way, shape, or form. But it is utterly delightful. It makes me happy. There is no stress involved in watching it at all, which means I can just enjoy myself and bask in it. For me, this is the TV show equivalent of afternoon tea: British, indulgent, mildly silly, and extremely enjoyable.
