WiC Watches: Good Omens

Episode 1: “In the Beginning”

I have read some Neil Gaiman. I have read some Terry Pratchett. I have never read Good Omens, so I’m going into this review pretty blind. After watching a super-serious adaptation of Gaiman’s work on Starz’s American Gods, I wasn’t sure of the tone Good Omens would go for. It’s brighter and goofier than I expected.

We open with God (voice of Frances McDormand) telling us that the Earth was made some 6,000 years ago, and that dinosaurs are a joke paleontologists haven’t figured out yet. Aziraphale and Crowley meet at the Garden of Eden, and debate why God didn’t put the Tree of Knowledge on a mountain or the Moon if he didn’t want people eating the fruit. Thousands of years later, the Antichrist is sent to live with the wrong family, there’s an extended bit where one of the “Satanic nuns” trying to bring about the apocalypse misinterprets a wink, etc. This show embraces its quirkiness with a ravenous hunger. There are notes of Monty Python. There are notes of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And it’s all extremely British.

And all that’s great, although the quirkiness can border on twee sometimes. It works better in some parts than others. I enjoyed Crowley showing up at the door of the house where he THINKS the young Antichrist lives, dressed as a woman, and saying in a low, deadpan voice, “I hear you need a nanny.” But Aziraphale turning up to the same door in facial prosthetics as a winsome gardener felt overdone and distracting. I think director Douglas Mackinnon, who’s worked on shows like Doctor Who and Outlander, could take things down just a notch or two.

But however twee the jokes can get, the performances anchor the series effectively. Sheen and Tennant are terrific in these roles, and play off each other very well. Crowley is the showier character, wearing sunglasses at night to hide his demonic eyes and blasting Queen as he drives through the night with the baby Antichrist in his backseat, but I was laughing more at Sheen’s Aziraphale, a buttoned-up angel who enjoys sushi and bookstores too much to just sit back and accept that the world is coming to an end, even if it is God’s plan.

That’s the crux of the conflict, by the way. The Antichrist is on Earth, which starts a countdown to the apocalypse. Both heaven and hell expect to go to war and to end existence in the process. Crowley and Aziraphale, who are on opposite sides of the conflict but both of whom enjoy the Earth too much to want to see it destroyed, are working to prevent armageddon. By the end of the first episode, the Antichrist came into his power when he got his very own hellhound, and it’s off to the faces from there.

So there’s a plot, but based on this first episode, Good Omens is going to be more about what fun Gaiman and Mackinnon can have during the journey than it is about reaching the destination. With a troupe of excellent actors in tow (I didn’t even mention Jon Hamm as the smug angel Gabriel or Nick Offerman as a macho American diplomat), I’m excited to see what trouble lies ahead.