If there is a fantasy counterpart to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then that counterpart is Good Omens. Admittedly, it's not the most daring comparison: both beloved novels are intensely British at their core in a way that goes far beyond mere provenance, but their true similarity isn't in tone or sensibility or even in the proportion of cookies per page Rather they share a defiant book attitude. After starting out as a radio series, Hitchhikers Guide went on to find life as a TV series, stage show, live-action movie, video game, comic book, and probably a few other things as well. Yet nothing could replicate the magic and joy of simply imagining the impossibilities Douglas Adams's brain had prepared.
Presumably the same applies to Good Omens. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchetts' story about a demon and an angel working together to prevent Armageddon worked so well as a book that while many fans wanted to see it as a movie or show how such a show could do the book justice, it was difficult. to imagine. . The challenges were many, from the aggressively fun exposition to the celestial special effects that might be required. Over the years, adaptations were planned and then abandoned, but when Amazon announced that it would be working with Gaiman to create a limited series at Pratchett's personal request, none other than Good Omens would finally have a chance to live up to the hype. your name.
Yes, it really does sometimes.
The best kind of book-to-screen adaptation welcomes fans and newcomers alike, and Good Omens hosts an ecumenical congregation. Even if you're not familiar with the book, you'll have no trouble keeping up. Still a Basic Manual Crowley David Tennant and Aziraphale Michael Sheen share an uneasy friendship between enemies that dates back to the Garden of Eden. Crowley, then known as Crawly, was there in the form of a snake to take care of the whole apple thing. Aziraphale was an angel with a sword of fire that he gave to the newly exiled Adam and Eve.
More recently, however, Crowley delivered the infant Antichrist to an unsuspecting human couple, and now, 11 years later, the race is on to get to pre-teen hellspawn Sam Taylor Buck before the end of the world comes. All the gangs here Famine War Pollution and Death ride motorcycles instead of horses Beelzebub Anna Maxwell Martin feels like a combination of Björk and The Cures Robert Smith's angel Gabriel Jon Hamm is amazingly coiffed and quite possibly needs a driving course the wrath. The aggressively funny exposition is also kept courtesy of Frances McDormand as the narrator, though here she is credited as The Voice of God because Gaiman knew that God had to be a woman.
The heart of Good Omens beats in the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale, in their odd-couple foibles, in their growing dependence on each other huddled together as their worldviews crumble around them, and Tennant and Sheen expertly nurture that pulse. Tennant oozes rock star nonchalance, Sheen and esthete prudishness. The lesser-known of the two, Sheen, had the added burden of playing a character that felt tailor-made for British comedy stalwarts like Martin Freeman or Simon Pegg, but he owns Aziraphale entirely, which makes him turns into a much older and caring Niles Crane. Watch the flashback from the last episode where Aziraphale does the gavotte and tell me Sheen wasn't born for this role.
The special effects, it must be said, are terrible. Horrible! Laughing knowingly terrible. When Crowley takes off his ubiquitous sunglasses, his reptilian eyes look like three sizes too big for his head, the explosions are big and loud and dare you not to roll your eyes. That is the point. Stripped of its evangelical scaremongering, the Book of Revelations is patently ridiculous, and leaning on that was exactly how Gaiman and Pratchett celebrated the most pious qualities of humans: to shape it without nonsense would be to disrespect the source of the program.
Speaking of what. All six episodes are written by Gaiman and directed by Douglas McKinnon, who directed Tennant in a couple of episodes of Doctor Who and won an Emmy for Best Television Movie for his work on Sherlock. That consistency is worth giving the episodes, which range from 45 minutes to an hour in length for a sitcom, a nice drag. Each catapults you into the next with real propulsion, not the cotton candy impermanence of so many shows designed for binge-watching. And while fans of the book will enjoy how much the adaptation process survives - Queen still plays in every car - that extra time isn't just for marginalia, this is a show that jumps from London to Iowa to Megiddo to Heaven itself and back again. Rushing will get you nowhere.
With streaming platforms lining up to pick out fantasy and sci-fi books, it's all too easy to resign yourself to a sea of bloated sagas. Everyone wants the next Game of Thrones or Battlestar Galactica to have dozens of characters that will draw millions of viewers for as many seasons as possible. How wonderful it is then that projects like Good Omens still exist, those that give up dreams of six seasons and one movie for six episodes and a guaranteed stalled landing. Such restraint may not be the answer to the life of the universe and all, but it's not a bad start.
0 Comments