Who Needs Omens when Things Always Turn Out Okay Anyway?

I realised last week the new season of Good Omens wasn't streaming week to week, as I thought, but had in fact premiered in entirety on the first day. So I worked my way through the rest of the six episodes over the past four days. It wasn't as hard as I dreaded, it does become a bit less saccharine after the first episode. I enjoyed the episode with Mark Gatiss as part of a trio of Nazi zombies and it was exciting to see Peter Davison as Job. Still, the show was overburdened with sweetness and light.

I went back and read my review for season one and was reminded how different Crowley and Aziraphale were back then. In season two, you get the impression that the demon Crowley had never intentionally done a bad thing and that Aziraphale is just plain dumb.

Crowley couldn't even bring himself to kill Job's goats. I'm not really sure what Gaiman and Finnemore were trying to say with their satire of the Book of Job. Either they're saying God worked through Aziraphale and Crowley to make Job's troubles less horrific, or they're criticising the bible for being cruel and wicked. Neither possibility is as satisfying as the complexity and emotion of the original work, which addresses the very real circumstance of a good person who suffers terribly.

But Good Omens 2 shows us a softer, kinder world where the virtuous are always found out and rewarded, and no-one truly dies.

Well, there's some permanent death in an episode that seems inspired by the Burke and Hare murders. Incidentally, one of David Tennant's first roles on Doctor Who, before he was cast as the Doctor, was playing a minor character in an audio play about the murders in 2004.

Like most stories about Burke and Hare, Aziraphale and Crowley's encounter with, in this case, a young woman who sells corpses to a surgeon highlights the moral ambiguities inherent in the tale. It's wrong to dig up corpses and sell them, yet medical science needed cadavers to save the living and the poor needed the money to be had by digging up corpses. When it came to murder, was it because the system pushed the criminal gradually and inexorably into that crime?

Aziraphale is bewildered at every turn, as though this is the first time in millions of years he's come across any difficult moral problem. But I guess that's the central joke of Good Omens, that all these characters, always and forever, act as though they were born yesterday. Except Crowley for some reason, who seems really bored this season.

The way he's always lounging around, half asleep, it's like you've invited your world travelling, adventuresome uncle to a 12 hour birthday party at Chuck E Cheese.

Good Omens 2 is available on Amazon Prime.

Heaven and Hell on a Cupcake

Everyone's favourite demon and angel duo are back in Good Omens 2, the second season of the series based on a Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett novel. It premiered on Friday with one episode. It's aggressively cute and occasionally funny.

Although it's new material, written by Gaiman and John Finnemore (Pratchett passed away years before the show was made), it hearkens back to the 1990s in many ways. I don't know if this was intentional or if Gaiman and Finnemore just need to get out more. There's a subplot about two women falling in love and one of them is considered odd because she has a store selling vinyl records. Do Gaiman and Finnemore really not know how popular vinyl records have become in the past ten years?

I suppose that could just be part of the deliberately unchallenging nature of the material. Crowley's supposed to be a demon but he doesn't exhibit any truly bad behaviour, for example. The worse he does is drive fast while listening to Queen. People who want to feel like rebels without actually stepping out of line can watch the show and feel like martyrs for owning vinyl Queen records.

I kind of wish Aziraphale would act more like an angel, too. When the amnesiac Gabriel calls Aziraphale and Crowley his "friends", it made sense when Crowley denied being his friend but I felt like Aziraphale would've said, "Of course we're your friends." I did really like the scene where Aziraphale, as her landlord, forgave the record shop owner for not paying her rent. If even a softball show like this is willing to lampoon the ridiculous rent prices in the western world now, maybe we're a little closer to real action.

The costumes and sets are all really adorable. The street and buildings constructed around Aziraphale's shop make even the show's "real" world feel like a fantasy, underlining the impression that all of this is set in some softer, sweeter plane of existence where angels and demons alike spend most of their time having adorably awkward dialogue. Even Crowley's choice of beverage at the coffee shop, just six shots of espresso in a cup, is like a child from the 1990s' impression of an unreasonably strong drink.

David Tennant and Michael Sheen as the two leads are both really good, particularly Tennant. John Hamm returns as the archangel Gabriel and his guileless innocence is very cute. He's introduced, this season, walking naked down the street to Aziraphale's shop and, in this adorable reality, a naked man in the street causes absolutely everyone to stop and watch him. I don't think I could binge this show, at least not without a drink stronger than six shots of espresso, but the show's being released one episode a week. And maybe one little drop of this super sweet confection, like a miniature cupcake buried in frosting and sprinkles, is enjoyable on a weekly basis.

If you like twee, this show is tweer than Lamb Chop copulating with a Care Bear on a bed of cotton candy.

Good Omens is available on Amazon Prime.

With Prophecies Like These . . .

Poor humanity, pitted between the competing, shallow boards of directors called Heaven and Hell. It falls to Aziraphale and Crowley, a reluctantly independent minded angel and demon, respectively, to avert apocalypse in Good Omens, a new-ish Amazon Prime series based on the 1990 novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The six episode series, while no masterpiece, is entertaining. I like it about exactly as much as I like the novel.

I discovered Neil Gaiman's work in the late 90s. I remember routinely buying collected volumes of Sandman at the mall when it still had a bookstore and sitting down on a bench then and there, reading each cover to cover. These rightly revered comics left me wanting more so I sought out Gaiman's prose works which were at that time limited to Stardust, Neverwhere, and Good Omens.

I liked them but none of them came close to Sandman. My favourite of the three was easily the edition of Stardust illustrated by Charles Vess, though I quite enjoyed Neverwhere, an adaptation of a television series written by Gaiman. I liked Good Omens, too, but as someone who'd seen the Monty Python movies and read Douglas Adams, it seemed like a more modest exercise in the ballpark of those greater works of satire. Though I don't think it's exactly fair to say it is simply that. My exposure to the works of Terry Pratchett is more limited--I've read one other of his novels and listened to an audio play--but I can see why he appeals to a very particular niche. He's about 60% tongue-in-cheek and 40% sincerity and you need to have a particular taste in order for those two elements not to cancel each other out. Sometimes it works for me and I can see Pratchett was a really clever author but his style was never as satisfying for me as it is for many other readers.

The new television series very much has that Pratchett tone but it's more fascinating for what an anachronism it is. This kind of humour based on religion felt so brilliant and transgressive in the 80s and 90s. Now as I watch it I find myself hoping viewers will care and suspecting many will just feel impatient. It used to be you could rely on the charming rogue to be the fan favourite but now in this world where young people seem to strongly prefer Luke over Han, I suspect everyone will much prefer Aziraphale to Crowley and many will be frustrated by the very idea that a Good Person would have a chummy relationship with a Bad Person. I do hope such viewers find their perspective shifted maybe just a little. Certainly Michael Sheen and David Tennant are well cast and have great chemistry. Tennant's particularly good, particularly in moments where he shows subtle emotional wounds when Aziraphale finally threatens to break off their secret alliance.

For myself, I don't find the best bits of Good Omens' satire quite as enduring as Life of Brian's. When Crowley remarks at the beginning, when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, that it's a bit harsh, I remembered being amused at the gentle tone used to show up a significant flaw in the basic worldview of western religion. But now, after a few years studying Milton, it's not nearly as exciting as Satan in Paradise Lost:

One fatal tree there stands, of knowledge called,
Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidden
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be sin to know?
Can it be death? And do they only stand
By ignorance? Is that their happy state,
The proof of their obedience and their faith?

This is so much better because it engages with the idea of forbidden knowledge and the reader is compelled to weigh the value of such a policy. The gentle nudge of humour in Good Omens suggests it's funny because it's outdated and silly while Satan's question in Paradise Lost remains terribly relevant. But, of course, it's not fair, really, to complain, "Good Omens isn't as good as Paradise Lost!" though maybe it's worth saying since there is a substantial push to see the classics as irrelevant and worthless.

The supporting cast on the series is wonderful except for Frances McDormand as God, the narrator. She might have been fine if she'd put on a British accent--so many of the casually absurd phrases she drops go down like lead with an American accent. Michael McKean, fresh from his brilliant role on Better Call Saul, puts on a Scottish accent as Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell and even though the accent isn't perfect he's still great in the role. He and Miranda Richardson are wonderfully sweet and funny.

Jack Whitehall and Adria Arjona are also very sweet and funny, Arjona in particular striking some pleasantly surprising notes with her dialogue. I do kind of wish the show's sex scene had been more convincing.

I loved Crowley berating his plants and expressing love for his car. The music from Queen was well deployed in the soundtrack. I really liked how the wardrobe for people from heaven wasn't limited to white and included powder blue shirts and caramel coloured shoes. Good Omens is available on Amazon Prime.