Neil Gaiman: “Global idiocy” makes 2019 the perfect year for a Good Omens series

There’s a lot of good TV coming out in 2019. One of the show’s I’m most looking forward to is Good Omens, an adaptation of the 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I’m as psyched as anyone to see the final season of Game of Thrones and the continuations of True Detective and Stranger Things, but Good Omens looks lighter, a comedic tale about an angel (Michael Sheen) and a demon (David Tennent) who have grown found of humanity over the past several thousand years and don’t want to see them wiped out by the impending biblical Armageddon. Also, it’s just a six-episode miniseries, so I don’t have to wonder if I need to get invested in a long-running series. Check out the trailer:

Pratchett, a titan in the world of fantasy fiction, died in 2015. But Gaiman, the author behind stuff like Sandman and American Gods, is still around to make sure the series, a collaboration between the BBC and Amazon Prime, is done right. He wrote the episodes and served as showrunner, with Sherlock vet Douglas Mackinnon handled directing duties. To hear Gaiman tell it to iNews, now is the perfect time for Good Omens to finally get a screen adaptation. “When the book was written, the only worry Terry and I had was that we were in this sudden new-found Glasnost-y magical world of 1990, when history was over and everything seemed at peace,” Gaiman remembered. “The idea of Armageddon seemed further away than ever.”

"Right now the nuclear clock is ticking, closer and closer to midnight. Now international terrorism is at an all-time high and so is polarization. Global idiocy is at an all time high, which makes it incredibly appropriate – we’re suddenly timely."

We’ll leave it to the internet at large to debate Gaiman’s take on the current state of the world, but we do know that adapting a book written in 1990 will require a few changes unless the director wants it to be a period piece. “The only thing the book didn’t predict was the Internet,” Mackinnon said. “We’ve touched it up for the present day and it’s very much set in 2019.”

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Good Omens will drop first on Amazon Prime Video, all at once in a binge-friendly format. Six months later, it will air episode by episode on BBC2. Watch this space.

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