Neil Gaiman is best known as the creator of the moody Sandman, a comic-book anti-hero who’d much rather slap on The Cure and pout in a corner than save the world. Gaiman also has a quirky side, however, and the second series of his urban fantasy Good Omens (Prime Video, from today) leans into it with a vengeance.
The quirkiness is 50 per cent attributable to the late Terry Pratchett, the celebrated fantasy author with whom Gaiman wrote the 1990 novel from which Good Omens is adapted. As showrunner, Gaiman burned through the book in the original season, in which Michael Sheen and David Tennant united as an angel and devil trying to postpone the Apocalypse.
With the novel successfully transposed to screen, Gaiman must now rustle up a new story on the fly. His solution is to reduce a previously sprawling saga of heaven vs hell to an aggressively whimsical chamber piece. Having staved off Armageddon, Aziraphale (Sheen) spends his days running a bookshop while Crowley (Tennant) vrooms around London in his Bentley.
Their gilded lives are interrupted when Archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm) walks into Aziraphale’s bookshop. He lacks clothes but has a box containing his memories. Hamm is best known as the dapper Don Draper from Mad Men. Gabriel is the opposite: where Draper is swaggeringly suave, Gabriel is a lovable lunk.
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Matt Cooper: I’m an only child. I’ve always been conscious of not having brothers or sisters
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At least for the time being. Back in Good Omens part one he was God’s ruthless enforcer. That side of his personality appears to have gone missing. But where is it? And why are the demon Shax (Miranda Richardson) and her mistress, Beelzebub (Bridgerton’s Shelley Conn, taking over from Anna Maxwell Martin), so desperate to locate Gabriel?
It’s as silly as a vicar in a tutu. But there are some charming flashbacks to Aziraphale and Crowley’s days as Old Testament prophets and to their time as amateur grave robbers in Enlightenment-era Edinburgh. These mini-episodes are clearly there to pad out the threadbare plot. But they are great fun – and surprisingly gory to boot.
With the Hollywood strikes delaying the return of Netflix’s Sandman, Good Omens is all the Gaiman we are likely to see on our screens for the foreseeable future. Nobody will mistake it for serious TV, and the bromantic duo of Sheen and Tennant can be a bit too pleased with themselves. Still, now more than ever, we could all do with some escapism. As a fluffy, fantastical distraction, Good Omens series two is just like heaven.
