Meh Omens
A sequel that leans a little too much toward fan service
For many years— pretty much all the time I lived in the DC area, and quite a few years up here as well— I kept a battered paperback copy of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in my car. It made for a great emergency backup in the days before smartphones— if I found myself stuck somewhere with time to kill, I could always flip through that and re-read some favorite scenes. It’s a great book that way, with endless little nuggets so that there was almost always some turn of phrase or unusual image that I hadn’t noticed before to chuckle at.
When Gaiman adapted it for the screen in 2019, I watched it on Amazon Prime and it was… fine. As I noted at the time, it’s kind of a hard book to adapt, for two main reasons, one being that a major plotline centers on the activities of a bunch of 11-year-old kids, the other that many of the book’s greatest charms are in the narration. The bits of the show that focused on the adult cast were mostly very good, though, particularly Michael Sheen and David Tennant as the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley (respectively). Their relationship through centuries of flashbacks (almost entirely original to the show) provided some of the best material of the show, and the two had great chemistry in the roles.
Inevitably, over the next couple of years, a lot of their scenes were meme-ified into a kind of romance— a lot of “Just kiss, already” text over .gifs of them from the show, and that sort of thing. Which, you know, isn’t really how I read the relationship in the book, but the Internet’s going to Internet. Rule 34 and all that.
Now there’s a Season 2 of the show, which on the one hand, I’m really not sure needs to exist, but on the other, the original was light and diverting, so why not? And there was an evening this week when Kate and The Pip were out shopping for new sneakers for our rapidly growing Little Dude, giving me the option to actually watch TV in the living room. I had finished the other streaming thing I was (slowly) watching (The Night Agent on Netflix, which was dumb but enjoyable), so I decided to give it a shot.
And, you know, the show brings back a lot of the things that were good in the original, like the historical flashbacks and Jon Hamm as the archangel Gabriel, and, of course, Sheen and Tennant as Aziraphale and Crowley. Not being dependent on the pre-existing book, this dispenses with the voice-over narration, and doesn’t need to involve child actors, which takes away two of the weaker elements. This ought to really work.
I’m only a couple of episodes in (a third of the season), so it’s got some room to go, but at this point, I’m really not wild about it. The conclusion of the Antichrist plot means that there are many fewer plotlines to juggle, making it essentially The Wacky Adventures of Aziraphale and Crowley, and what was great as leavening for a multi-threaded plot about other things turns out to be a bit much when it’s the only thing going (there’s a second plot about an attempted romance between two shopkeepers on Aziraphale’s street, and kind of a third about machinations in Heaven, but they don’t get a lot of screen time).
Also, it’s really leaning into the romance angle, with a bunch of shots where Sheen is looking longingly at Tennant, and the whole thing just kind of makes me sigh, because it feels like such blatant fan service. It’s entirely too aware of the meme version of the original show, and playing to it in a way that’s so crashingly unsubtle that it becomes off-putting for me. There’s a kind of pandering feel to it, a “You like this right? Please like this…” element that’s external to the story on screen but also feels like the primary thing driving the action.
I’m not saying it’s completely inappropriate or anything like that— they’re Gaiman’s characters, after all, and if he wants them to be Innn Luuuvvv, that’s his prerogative. It’s just Very Much Not My Thing, and feels like a significant shift away from the aspects that made the book so endlessly re-readable for me, to the overall detriment of the show.
(This kind of thing happens a fair bit. I liked the first season of The Magicians quite a bit as an adaptation of the book series, but there was a point where it became clear that Eliot and Margo were fan favorites, and the show shifted to make their zany antics more central, at which point I kind of lost interest, and stopped watching. Which is not to say that was a bad decision on the part of the showrunners, because it continued for several seasons past when I tuned out…)
I’ll probably finish it out, because there isn’t a ton of other recent stuff that I’m more fired up for, and Jon Hamm’s scenes have been pretty funny. But I really wish it was going in a different direction than it at least seems to be from the first third.
I realize that “Fine, but not for me” is not the most thrilling review, but, you know, that’s what I’ve got at this point. If you want to see whether I finish it, here’s a button:
And if you want to try to convince me that it’s better than I think, the comments will be open:
I felt the same way about The Magicians -- loved the first season but gradually lost interest and didn't finish it (I might go back one day). I can't really say you'll like GO 2 if you don't by the first few episodes and it is definitely fan-pandery (also I just find it weird that there's an actor playing a completely different character than she played in the first season). I'm glad I watched it with my kid who was there for the fan service.
Ugh. Nope doesn't get better. Very bummed.