Good Omens (TV Mini-Series – 2019)

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

I want to start off my saying I absolutely love the aesthetic of the posters:

And I also, love the character posters with the prophesies on them!

Source: Imp Awards

Aren’t they pretty?!?!  I am slightly obsessed with them right now ❤

If you missed my review of the book you can find it here.  I really really liked the book, but I liked the show better.

I know! I know! Its blasphemy! But hear me out.  The book was really good but I felt on the verge of being completely lost the whole time.  I missed a lot of the nuances but still understood the general overall story.  This didn’t happen with the show.  Usually when I watch a film adaptation I find myself thinking people who didn’t read the book won’t fully grasp the plot line because the film left too much out.  But with Good Omens they took out all the parts that made the book confusing and pared it down into a concise neat story.

This next part I want to talk about the differences between the show and the book.  I will try not to go into too many details because I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you don’t want to know what they left out or what they added then I would skip this next part.

Click here to see the differences.

Lets start with the things they left out.  They left out the scene where the kids at Warlock’s birthday party stole the guard’s guns, and I get why they did it, with all the school shootings and stuff it would have been in pretty poor taste to include that scene.  They also left out Geronimo which was fine.  Again, this was probably a politically correctness issue, and I get it.

Also left out was the four bikers (Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Really Cool People, and Treading In Dogshit (formerly All Foreigners Especially The French, formerly Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping, never actually No Alcohol Lager, briefly Embarrassing Personal Problems, and finally People Covered in Fish) which was also fine because I didn’t really like them in the book (though I wish they had kept the part where Death refuses to answer the question asking when Elvis died because Death had never actually collected him! They even set the scene up by showing him working in Famine’s restaurant!)

There were two scenes that they left out that I would have liked to see.  The first was when Aziraphale came back to Earth and was trying to find his way to Tadfield by inhabiting different bodies.  He did still end up inside of Madame Tracy, but we didn’t get to see his stops on the way to get there.  It wouldn’t have added anything to the story but I thought it was funny and liked that part.

The second part I missed was when Adam hugged his dad at the end.  I feel like him running to his dad and hugging him and his dad getting this confused but happy look on his face was super important to Adam’s development.  It showed that Adam completely accepted his dad and loved him.  I had two big issues with the show, and leaving this out was one of them.

The other issue was the giant Satan.  He didn’t actually show up in the book and I liked it better that way.  In the book when he disappeared it said that a deep rumbling laugh could be heard.  The way I read it was that this whole apocalypse thing was never really the Devil’s goal.  He was really just teaching his son and allowing him to be Human.  It was his great plan all along for the apocalypse to fail.  Its possible that God was in on it all too and that Crowley and Aziraphale were meant to be friends.  I liked that thought, but with Satan actually showing up in the show and being very angry it doesn’t really fit anymore.  I was bummed about that.

They didn’t just take stuff out they added stuff too, and I LOVED the part they added where Crowley is sentenced to die via Holy Water and Aziraphale was sentenced to die via Demon Fire.  I thought that part was brilliant! That was probably my favorite scene.

 

I thought they did an amazing job casting Good Omens. Newt and Anathema were my particular favorites. They were exactly as I pictured! But I love the casting for EVERYONE. Including David Tennant (if you read my book review I was a little worried about him because I pictured Mark Sheppard in my mind while reading. It took me about a half and episode to get used to David Tennant and then I was in love!)

Crowley is still my favorite character and I thought the flaming Bentley was awesome (even though the part where he was actually driving through the flames was a bit shorter than I would have liked)

 

In the book had thought that Crowley and Aziraphale were straight up friends, but there was a lot of sexual tension in the show and I loved the dynamic.  It brought their relationship to whole new level and I thought it was very well done!

Overall the show was amazing and I loved it! I am glad I read the book first but, despite the two issues I mentioned earlier, I think the show was better! They did a phenomenal job.  (I learned that the six episode series was written and created by Gaiman, who also served as showrunner, so that might have had something to do with it being so amazing)