Review: "Good Omens" (Miniseries)

So I watched the Amazon Good Omens miniseries, and I hated it so, so, so, so much. Hear me out.

A note before I begin. I don’t do ‘They changed it, so it sucks’ reviews of adaptations. Sometimes changes are very much for the better—the book version of Jumanji is eminently forgettable, while the movie (if a little dated) is great. Moreover, because film and page are different media, some changes are intrinsically necessary to suit the language of the new medium. But changes that take out good things that could have been included are defects, and changes that add bad or irrelevant things are defects. And changes aside, an adaptation should be able to stand on its own as a work of art. Make a movie with plot problems that are only resolved in the book you based the movie on, and what you’ve done is make a movie with plot problems. Having source material is no excuse for poor craftsmanship.

And to be clear and fair, two things I did not hate about the series were David Tennant and Michael Sheen as Crowley and Aziraphale. Their performances were exquisite, and almost carried the piece; in fact one of the things I hate about Amazon's Good Omens is that these two were squandered on such a dumpster fire of an adaptation. The chemistry between them is fantastic, and fits beautifully into the ‘Are they friends? Are they lovers? Are they enemies after all?’ ethos that the book conveys (the reason they’re not lovers being, in the book’s words, that ‘Angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort’). Bravissimo to them both for outstanding performances.

Josie Lawrence's cameo as Agnes Nutter also deserves a better series than this, and I'm not 100% sure Miranda Richardson could do a bad job acting if she tried, so her Madame Tracy is very winsome indeed. But Tennant and Sheen between them couldn’t quite save it, and Lawrence and Richardson can’t either.

What I hated was, above all:

- the narration;

- nearly every other performance;

- many of the textual and character changes made from book to screen;

- the significant plot changes between the book and the script.

The second worst-handled aspect of the miniseries is the narration. Now, I don’t share the hostility of Cinema Sins et al. to narration as such, and I really like Frances McDormand. But her performance is, on this occasion, not good: it sounds like the voiceover for Blade Runner, uninvested in the story and irrelevant to it, and not at all like the narrator is having a good time. And that’s a tragic waste, because the one thing that narration, and nothing else, could have translated to the screen from the book is the merriment of its narrative voice. That merriment, the tell-tale quality of anything Pratchett touched, is almost entirely absent in the series, because so much of it comes from tone that McDormand didn’t capture and jokes that Gaiman didn’t include. And he came so close to so many, and it would have been so easy to put them in the voiceover! For instance, one of my favorite lines in the book is the isolated paragraph: ‘It has been said that the devil has all the best tunes. This is broadly true. But heaven has all the best choreographers.’ There were two scenes (one in heaven, one between Crowley and Aziraphale) where I felt sure we were going to hear that line in the narration … any minute now … nope.

And joyless cuts like this are legion: gone is most of the drunk conversation about how long eternity is, gone are the details of the Chattering Nuns of the Satanic Order of St Beryl, gone is the allusion to a wave of low-grade goodness emanating from the destruction of a telemarketers’ office, gone is all of Dog’s internal monologue, gone is the explanation for why there’s so much Queen playing.3 As a result the whole tone of the script is so much less funny and light than the novel, while at the same time not landing its punches nearly as well. But we’ll get to that.

The actress playing Anathema Device gives a lifeless performance, without any of the aura of wit and keen good sense that Anathema possesses in the book. She just sort of says lines while facing the relevant character. But this may be at least partly because she wasn’t given a real character to work with. There’s no sense that she’s straining to make sense of her ancestress’ prophecies because she has a sense of mission and purpose, and no hint that she’d rather not be psychic, as there is in the book. She’s completely flat. They ,try to give her a sense of arc by including Newton’s line near the end, ‘Do you want to be a professional descendant your whole life?’ But since being a professional descendant has had no negative consequences for her to date and she’s expressed no dissatisfaction with it, it doesn’t represent a resolution of anything she wants as a character, and the emotional payoff is accordingly zero.

Shadwell, being a character defined as much or more by description than by words, is pretty gutted on a screen. Michael McKeen ,is a good actor, but it’d take an Anthony Hopkins or a Cate Blanchett to make the depiction work. Brian Cox as Death was also specially disappointing. Of course, it’s hard to convey just how delightful Death as a character is when he’s in Terry Pratchett’s deft hands; but Brian Cox isn’t the man to do it, and it isn’t done. The other three horsemen, War, Famine, and Pollution, aren’t terrible, but their lines are (it was during Famine's first appearance on screen that I began to notice how uninteresting most of the dialogue was). Mostly they just say over and over that they’ve been waiting for the apocalypse for a long time, like a really long time, man, and they’re super into it. Let them tell you, they are super into the apocalypse, just stoked. I mean, they’ve been waiting for it for thousands of years, and now it’s here, and they are in. To. It. You don’t even know. They’re very big fans of the apocalypse, man.

As a sidebar, this is one of several examples of the incredibly bad pacing of the series. For a few episodes it’s fine; then, about halfway through, as the eleven-year-old Antichrist levitates into the air and begins scaring his three friends, the plot just sort of parks there for a nap. He promises them that his new friends are coming … and then adds that his new friends are going to come real soon … with the extra detail that it won’t be long before his new friends are here. An entire episode passes without anything, you know, happening (and there are only six episodes in the series). This would be bad enough for a peripheral subplot, but it lies soggily at the center of the action, both structural and temporal.

Returning to the acting, the child acting of the Them is bad. Really bad. This is common enough for child acting, although cinema like Signs,2 IT: Chapter One, and Stranger Things have proven that it is not actually a necessity; and when four of the ostensible principals of the story, including the Antichrist, are eleven-year-olds, it's pretty momentously important that they be talented actors. The Them’s performances are not only stilted and unconvincing, but boring; you can't engage with them as characters at all.

This is partly because of big problem number three, which is a big number two: with the exception of Crowley and Aziraphale themselves, the characters are mostly left out. This might be forgivable in a movie; in a miniseries, and one with the leaden-footed, repetitive plod of this one, it isn't. The Them’s funniest and most believable lines and scenes in the book (notably their Spanish Inquisition) are all whittled down almost past recognition, and often robbed of their significance when they do make it in. A perfect example is the description of the precocious Wensley: in the book it’s mentioned that his parents ‘called him Youngster, in the hope that he might take the hint.’ In the miniseries, it’s mentioned that his parents called him youngster, and that’s it. No payoff. Just a fact about Wensley’s life, with no relevance to literally anything. The children are not the only characters to be thus maimed, but, given that they are at the center of the convergence of the other disparate plot threads—the Horsemen, Anathema Device, Aziraphale and Crowley, and the representatives of Hell and Heaven that are trying to force the apocalypse—it shows worst in the Them.

Maybe some of these abbreviating changes were made in the name of giving Jon Hamm's Gabriel more screen time? Which would be a really odd choice, because Gabriel isn't even in the book and serves no narrative purpose in the adaptation that book-originals couldn't—for instance, the Metatron, whom he replaces in the crucial (anti-)climax for, to all appearances, no reason whatsoever. Or if they were dead-set on getting Hamm for star power, why not cast him as, I don't know, the Metatron? It’d be a wrench to give up Derek Jacobi’s appearance in anything, true, but the Metatron is an actual character who fits into the plot and themes of the book, in a way that Gabriel doesn’t. This is a pointless change that adds nothing. People who haven’t read the book don’t benefit by it, and assholes like me write two thousand word screeds denouncing it.

Speaking of the themes—I can hardly believe I’m saying this about a script written by one of the co-authors of the original novel, but it botches them badly. The theme is summarized pretty well in the moment at the book’s climax, when Aziraphale grabs Crowley by the wrist, staring at Adam Young with a light of joy in his eyes, and says that (despite everyone’s best efforts), ‘He isn’t good or evil. He’s just—human.’ This is transposed to Aziraphale and Crowley telling Adam this in a weird video game cut scene, an emotional punch that has no force behind it, because Adam has never raised the question of his own goodness or badness and knows nothing about the efforts of others to control him.

This meandering blandness washes into the showdown between Adam and Satan, another adaptation addition, where Adam rejects Satan because … Satan’s not his real dad, because he wasn’t there for him as a kid? Yeah, that’s the reason. Huh. Okay. This big-lipped alligator of a clichéd let-me-explain-this-with-my-words motive has no setup, no relevance to anything that happens, and no character payoff since Adam had already made his pivotal decision, but there it is. Humans aren’t fundamentally good or evil! but if Satan had been emotionally available to Adam Young then maybe the world would have ended on schedule. Plot!

And then we’re still not done for some reason because Aziraphale and Crowley have to be punished by their respective sides, because it’s not yet sufficiently clear that heaven and hell are actually both full of jerks, I guess. This isn’t terrible, and honestly almost any pretext to get Sheen and Tennant on screen as these characters is worth the contrivance, but—particularly though not only because of the twist it’s resolved in—it adds nothing and goes nowhere, since both the information and the character development it ostensibly represents are things we already had from the first five and a half episodes.

So, yeah. Thing Bad, or at best Thing C+ (I’d have said D- but Tennant and Sheen really are that phenomenal). I’m almost pissed I signed up for Amazon Prime to watch it.

1Not to be confused with Michael Sheen.

2Yes, I will fight you: the child acting in Signs is excellent. I admit I did start hating M. Night Shyamalan pretty late; I even enjoyed Lady In the Water, though I did and do acknowledge that it has some major problems and, ahem, dubious casting decisions. This doesn’t change the fact that Abigail Breslin and Rory Caulkin gave remarkably good performances in Signs.

3To be clear, the use of Queen does not require explanation in any context whatever; but when an explanation is (1) offered, (2) funny, and (3) one of the running jokes of the whole book, mayhap it belongs in the narration.
Also yes, I realized while copying this into blog post form that I'd moved a paragraph without correcting the footnote numbers. Sorry.