Review: Amazon’s Good Omens is every bit as entertaining as the original novel

[Karlston]

Review: Amazon’s Good Omens is every bit as entertaining as the original novel

The late Terry Pratchett is likely smiling in some version of an afterlife.

Enlarge / Michael Sheen and David Tennant star in Amazon Prime's TV adaptation of the 1990 novel Good Omens.

Amazon Prime

Heaven and Hell prepare to face off in the long-planned battle of Armageddon, but an angel, a demon, and a rebellious Antichrist aren't enthusiastic about the prospect in Good Omens. The six-part limited series is based on the original 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, and it's every bit as entertaining as the source material.

 

(Some spoilers for the book and series below.)

 

Confession: I am an uber-fan, having read the book multiple times over the last 19 years. I'll likely read it several more times before I kick off this mortal coil, so I'm very much in the target audience for the series. Good Omens is the story of an angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and a demon Crowley (David Tennant) who gradually become friends over the millennia and team up to avert Armageddon. They've come to be rather fond of the Earth and all its humans with their many foibles, you see—not to mention the perks that come with our big blue orb, like sleek electronics and quaint little restaurants where they know you. The supernatural pair doesn't really want the Antichrist—an 11-year-old boy named Adam (Sam Taylor Buck) who has grown up unaware of his pivotal role in the coming apocalypse—to bring an end to all of that.

 

I suspect Gaiman loves the book as much, if not more, than its most ardent fans, and that love shines through every scene of the adaptation. There's a moment in Good Omens when Anathema Device (descended from a famous witch) tells Newton Pulsifer (descended from a famous witchfinder) about the town of lower Tadfield, where the Antichrist is prophesied to rise: "There isn't any evil here. There's just love. Something or someone loves this place. Loves every inch of it so powerfully that it shields and protects it. A deep-down huge, fierce love. How can anything bad start here?"

This is pretty much everything fans could hope for in a TV adaptation.

 

The same goes for Gaiman's adaptation: it's his deep-down huge, fierce love driving everything, and that is ultimately what makes the series a sheer joy to watch (even though season two of American Gods may have suffered a bit from Gaiman's absence). The series almost slavishly follows the novel in many respects—right down to the soundtrack packed with the music of Queen, because a running gag is that any cassette tape (it was 1990, folks) left in the car for longer than a fortnight automatically turns into the band's Greatest Hits compilation. And that's just fine with me. Apart from a few minor quibbles, this is pretty much everything fans could hope for in a TV adaptation of Good Omens.

 

Among other strengths, the miniseries boasts terrific performances from a truly stellar cast. Tennant and Sheen were inspired choices for the two lead roles; they have incredible onscreen chemistry and bring those characters to vivid life. Gaiman admitted during a recent panel at SXSW that he was thinking of Tennant as Crowley while writing the script: "I thought, there's no other human who could play Crowley." Similarly, it's hard to imagine a more perfect foil to Tennant's brashly irreverent demon than Sheen's sweetly anxious angel fretting over his divided loyalties.

 

As for the supporting cast, Jon Hamm is deliciously smarmy as the Archangel Gabriel, the ultimate not-too-bright bureaucrat, who scoffs when Aziraphale tells him there doesn't necessarily have to be a war: "Of course there does. How else would we win it?" Michael McKean plays Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell to perfection opposite an equally well-matched Miranda Richardson, who become mentors of sorts to unlikely lovers Newton (Jack Whitehall) and Anathema (Adria Arjona), keeper of the only accurate book of prophecies ever written.

 

 

Gaiman successfully fought to keep Agnes Nutter—author of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch—in the series, despite the high cost of recreating a medieval English village in which to burn her at the stake. But true book fans will lament the absence of the four British bikers who run into the Four Horsemen (er, Bikers) of the Apocalypse—the original Hell's Angels—in a pub and decide to ride with them. In the book, War, Famine, Pollution (who took over when Pestilence retired, "muttering something about penicillin"), and Death are joined by Pigbog (aka Really Cool People), Greaser (aka Cruelty to Animals), Big Ted (aka Grievous Bodily Harm), and Skuzz (aka Embarrassing Personal Problems, before changing to Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them a Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager). It's already a sprawling cast of characters, so I get why Gaiman et al. chose to leave them out of the TV adaptation. But they are missed.

 

There are also a couple of notable additions. For instance, Gaiman's script fleshes out Aziraphale and Crowley's long history, as they meet up at various points through brief flashbacks: the Garden of Eden, of course, but also Noah's ark, ancient Rome, the 1970s, and Elizabethan England, where they watch a rehearsal of Hamlet at the Globe by a struggling William Shakespeare. (Tennant's various period-appropriate hairstyles are practically a special effect.) Most notably, there's an extra plot twist in the later episodes that's not in the book. It makes the pacing lag a bit toward the end. Ultimately, I think the twist works, but it might annoy hardcore purists.

Tennant’s various period-appropriate hairstyles are practically a special effect.

 

The friendship between Aziraphale and Crowley is very much the heart of the tale, and it mirrors that of Gaiman and Pratchett in many respects: marrying the dark vision of the former and light comic sensibility of the latter produced the best of both worlds in the novel. The two writers had long planned to adapt Good Omens into a film, yet the project never came together. By 2011, there were rumors of a TV series in the works, but then the author of the Discworld novels was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and tragically died. Gaiman didn't want to even consider moving forward without his friend of 30 years, but Pratchett himself urged him to reconsider in a letter shortly before his death.

 

"Terry, who never asked anything of me in all our years of friendship, wrote to me and said, 'You have to do this. You're the only person out there who has the passion and understanding for Good Omens that I have. You have to make it into television because I want to see it before the lights go out,'" Gaiman said during a Q&A at the May 28 World Premiere event in London. "I thought I had six or seven years of Terry left, but then he died, which suddenly turned [Good Omens] into his last request."

 

There is even a small tribute to Pratchett in a scene set in Aziraphale’s bookshop, per Gaiman's Instagram: "There's a little area of Books by one of his favorite authors and a hat that one of the customers left behind and will be back for one day." I'd like to think Pratchett is smiling in some version of an afterlife at what his great friend and writing partner has wrought.

 

Good Omens is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

 

Source: Review: Amazon’s Good Omens is every bit as entertaining as the original novel (Ars Technica)

 

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