For the past couple of months I have been reading a slew of Terry Pratchett novels from his Discworld series. However, what prompted this reading frenzy was my viewing of Good Omens, a TV show based on the novel of the same name, that Pratchett co-wrote with Neil Gaiman. I never got around to writing about this show when it first dropped on Amazon Prime and the BBC, but it is such a masterfully constructed piece of art, based on such an iconic piece of literature, that I would be remiss if I didn’t remind all of you to watch it posthaste if you haven’t done so already.
This is a show about Armageddon. And yes, I swear it’s a comedy. It centers around the angel Aziraphele (Michael Sheen) and the demon Crowley (David Tennant), who have been around since Adam and Eve and have built up an unlikely friendship over the millennia. Please take another look at that casting – Michael Sheen and David Tennant are a dream team, and honestly, I would be recommending this show even if it were complete garbage, just because the two of them are co-starring in it. Thankfully, the show is phenomenal. The premise is that the two have an alliance, where the angel does something good that gets cancelled out by the demon doing something bad, or vice versa, and over the centuries, they’ve realized they don’t really need to do much to keep senior management appeased. Humans are capable of generating enough horror and goodness by themselves that angelic and demonic intervention is superfluous. So instead, the two carry on through the ages in an easy equilibrium, until the day that Crowley is handed a basket with a squalling baby. This is the Antichrist, and Crowley has to effect a switch with the impending baby that the American ambassador’s wife is about to give birth to. In twelve years, that child will be able to summon his powers to launch Armageddon.
Crowley isn’t thrilled about this. He has gotten quite comfortable with life among the humans and doesn’t really want to see Earth get destroyed. So together, he and Aziraphele hatch a plan where they’ll jointly influence the child as he grows up, exposing him to just enough goodness and just enough evil that by the time the apocalypse is nigh, the child will be somewhat ambivalent and not achieve anything. Unfortunately, there is a very complicated series of mishaps, which means that the wrong child is placed into the wrong hands, and all the work of the next twelve years is completely useless when Doomsday arrives. After setting up this backstory, we count down the days to Armageddon, which features a bewildering series of plots and engaging characters, including witches, Witch Finders, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (who have all been upgraded to motorcycles to keep up with the times), and a dog named Dog. All of these disparate elements coalesce into a wondrous whole until we finally reach a conclusion that is worthy of being described as EPIC.
The highest compliment I can ever give a movie or TV show based on a book is that it makes me revisit the book and love it even more; this show accomplished that with ease. Good Omens is a wonderfully faithful adaptation – I had forgotten so much, but the show captures everything that is great and inventive and wacky about this book and why it has been beloved to so many readers for the past 29 years. Featuring a brilliant supporting cast, wonderful voice acting, a suitably big budget to bring all the crazy special effects to life, and punctuated by the music of Queen, there’s so much to love about this series. It is merely six episodes, so it’s a small time commitment, but if you’re like me, you will get sucked into a literary wormhole, and then all bets are off. But what a beautiful way to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment