Good Omens tries to trade on an affable relationship between an angel and demon but they, and the show, run out of gas before the end, says Dan Slevin.
Michael Sheen and David Tennant in Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. Photo: Amazon
Yesterday, I mentioned that I don’t like to review a television series until I have seen it all the way through to the end. Endings are important, after all. A good ending can make all the difference to the success of a show. Not just wrapping up loose ends but cementing or confirming themes, supplying satisfying twists or just explaining the previously unexplained.
I’m especially glad that I waited until the end of Good Omens, the new BBC/Amazon Prime adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 comic fantasy novel, because its ending managed to pull off none of those things and left me feeling very flat – especially as I had just binged four hours of the show to get to that disappointment.
Good Omens is about two basically decent civil servants, forced by fate to be on opposite sides in the battle for dominance over humanity that has been raging for millennia. Michael Sheen (bleached blond) is the angel Aziraphale, slightly absent-minded lover of sweet things, and the louche redhead Crowley (David Tennant), the serpent who offered Eve the fateful apple in Eden, now on Earth to foment evil but increasingly his heart isn’t in it.
Photo: Amazon
Eleven years ago, Crowley took his eye off the ball and placed the baby antichrist – intended for the American Ambassador (Nick Offerman) and his wife (Jill Winternitz) – with a clichéd English couple (Daniel Mays and Sian Brooke) so the little time-bomb goes to live a delightfully middle-class childhood in the bucolic Suffolk village of Tadfield, not realising he’s the key to the final battle between good and evil, the end of the world, Armageddon itself.
In the present day, the warmly affable relationship between the angel and the demon – they’ve realised that humanity needs little help to be either good or evil and that their efforts essentially cancel each other out so why bother? – is thrown into disarray when the it emerges that neither of the children is who Heaven or Hell thinks they are.
Good Omens feels dated. Gaiman has adapted the novel himself with great reverence to the relationship that he and Pratchett had. The problem here is that none of it feels very relevant – either politically or socially, let alone theologically or spiritually. The idea that both Upstairs and Downstairs are just different versions of the same meaningless score-keeping bureaucracy is amusing enough for a while but can’t sustain six episodes.
The charms of Sheen and Tennant also wear pretty thin. Tennant, in particular, seems to be doing an impression of Bill Nighy’s famous faded rock star from Love Actually and I found myself wishing both actors had been able to keep their delicious regional British accents (Sheen is Welsh and Tennant famously Scottish) instead of the ones they use.
Jon Hamm (centre) as Gabriel gives Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) a dressing down in Good Omens. Photo: Amazon
One note performances are also the norm from most of the expensive supporting cast. Mad Men’s Jon Hamm is Gabriel, Miranda Richardson plays a medium named Madame Tracy, Bill Paterson as an officious village neighbourhood watch watcher and Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean is an ineffectual Scottish witch finder. Cameos abound – David Morrissey, Brian Cox (the voice of Death) and even Benedict Cumberbatch has approximately four lines in the final episode.
By episode six (of six) everything seems to have run out of juice to the extent that the big showdown between Satan, Gabriel, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, etc just falls flat. Disappointingly unspectacular.
Good Omens is rated 16+ according to Amazon Prime’s own rating system (presumably for some language, some violence and some themes, none of which we found to be terribly off-putting).
