Good Omens started life as a 1990 novel about an angle and a demon who team up to prevent the apocalypse, co-written by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett. In 2019, Gaiman turned the book into a TV show, with Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale and David Tennant as the demon Crowley. A second season took the story beyond the pages of the original book, and a third was set to finish the story.
Things got complicated when Gaiman was accused of sexual impropriety by multiple women, allegations he has denied. Gaiman stepped back from the third season of the show, which was reimagined as a feature-length final episode rather than a full season of TV. Amazon has yet to set a release date for its debut on Prime Video. Still, we assumed we were going to get it sooner or later.
Michael Sheen doesn't sound as sure. "I really don’t know what’s going to happen with it,” he told The Times. “We were both relieved we finished the story, but that’s within this really difficult, complicated, disturbing context. I hope people get to see it, but that, to a large extent, is out of our hands.”
Networks have been silently scuttling their projects based on Neil Gaiman properties. For instance, Netflix will air the second and final season of The Sandman, based on Gaiman's comic book, next month. The comic is long enough to adapt into far more than two seasons, although it's possible the shortened run has more to do with the show being too expensive to make. The lack of marketing, however, I attribute more to wanting to tread lightly around the Gaiman issue.
But at least Netflix is releasing more episodes of The Sandman. I never considered that Amazon would film a finale for Good Omens and then not release it. Sheen knows more about the production than I do, but I tend to think we'll see it, sooner or later.
Still, it's a difficult situation. Tennant also weighed in on the state of Good Omens a couple months ago. "There's been a slight rejig with the personnel. But we still get to tell that story which I think, it would have been very difficult to leave it on a cliffhanger," he said. "So, I'm glad that's been worked out."
Did something happen between then and now? We'll keep our ear to the ground. In the meantime, the second season of The Sandman premieres on Netflix on Thursday, July 3. Another cache of episodes will drop on Thursday, July 24, and the series will end for good when a final episode drops a week after that on July 31.
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