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Good Omens
2019 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Neil Gaiman
ComedyDramaScience FictionFantasy
Aziraphale and Crowley, of Heaven and Hell respectively, have grown rather fond of the Earth. So it's terrible news that it's about to end. The armies of Good and Evil are amassing. The Four Horsemen are ready to ride. Everything is going according to the Divine Plan...except that someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist. Can our heroes find him and stop Armageddon before it's too late?
8 positive1 mixed7 neutralfrom 16 commenters
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16 comments on Hacker News
Are you familiar with Pratchett & Gaiman's "Good Omens" (book and TV series)? It has a certain amount of that general spirit.
Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.
I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
My two favorite hidden gems are Patriot and ZeroZeroZero. They also did Outer Range, A Hero (movie), Red Oaks, Good Omens, and Mozart in the Jungle.
The Boys and Invincible are both excellent, but more “mainstream” shows.
Good omens TV show really carried the tone of the book really well (except for the heaven and hell scenes).
So if you need a lower barrier of entry to Pratchett books, the series might be a good start.
I try to keep an open mind.
e.g. I was not holding out much hope when "Damon Lindelof producer of Lost, decided what we really needed was for him to create a new TV series in the Watchman universe"
Whether Neuromancer works out, I have no idea. There's no end of money being wasted by the streamers on prestigious properties - but occasionally you'll get a Watchmen or Good Omens or Sandman.
Other positive is that we're living in a time where these can be "done justice". If it needs to cost $15M an hour to make and run for 10 hours to tell the story properly - well it now can be made.
It might not be told well, it might make bile spew from my very core - but somebody can have a crack at it.
Yeah. I have heard that there will be a "Season Two" of Good Omens. Apparently, Gaiman and Pratchett were working on a sequel, when PTerry goot too sick to complete it.
My partner and I enjoyed the Good Omens TV series, even though it was a bit silly.
If you had afsked me a year ago if “Good Omens” could be adapted to the screen I would have told you it was impossible. Heck if you asked me back in the day of A Song of Fire and Ice could, I would have told you it was impossible, but in reality it’s just the case that it’s only possible if you start from a place of respecting the source material and building everything around that. If you start by defining that it has to be a 8 season high budget series. It has to be a 2.5hour movie and try to shoehorn the material into that, then you get rubbish and it looks impossible.
What? Really?
Well, for a start, the hilarious _Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, witch._ Co-written with Terry Pratchett, also a great radio serial and a wonderful TV series from about 3 years ago.
Secondly, multiple superb novels, such as _Stardust_ and _Coraline_, both adapted into successful feature films; _Neverwhere_, a low-budget British TV series; and _American Gods_, a huge, big-budget TV series.
Everything he has written has a rich vein of humour. Even perhaps the most tragic of the Sandman series, _Death: The Sound of her Wings_.
"You keep doing that, you know what you're going to get? "FAT PIGEONS!"
I do now prefer the "mini-series" approach. Like "Good Omens". Take a good book and turn it into a mini-series. There are so many good books about - no need to create crappy multi-season series.
Ready Player One was competently directed by freaking Steven Spielberg with a "$155–175 million" budget and still sorta disappointed lots of us who had read the book.
Perhaps some awesome scifi books are just better left to the imagination?
Edit: I felt the same after watching "Ender's Game" (2013).
Edit 2: I felt that the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens" featuring David Tennant and Michael Sheen was absolutely brilliant. I hadn't gotten around to reading the book yet though...
There are absolutely many video games that are non-violent. But yes, people do like violence too. And that's okay.
> Particularly as we try to grow the tent and move games from being just video games to more, sort of, cultural artifacts.
I don't want to be a dick, but, like, do you not read books or watch TV or movies or anything? Because those areas are all chock full of violence. Particularly if you look at movies, what are the biggest hits? Action-adventure flicks, like the Marvel movies, right? And yet nobody says "well if movies want to be cultural artifacts, they really have to move on past this sort of thing..." with a straight face.
As I was working on my computer tonight my wife was watching Good Omens on TV, nice little miniseries, and while I wouldn't normally categorize it as a particularly violent show, there's still kids stabbing dudes with a flaming sword, demons murdering other demons, etc.
Like, I just don't know how someone can be aware of the fact that violence is pervasive in all sorts of media, and then seriously suggest that video games have to somehow move past that to match those forms of media. Because they already have non-violent games as well, so you can't actually be asking for that, that would make even less sense.
They raised their prices and shut down several popular series early. I cancelled my subscription last week because I was finding it hard to find something good to watch that I hadn't seen yet. I'm now catching up on a few things on Amazon Prime like the Expanse season 3, American Gods, Good Omens and a few other things. I will probably switch back in a few months when Netflix has added a few things that I might want to see. They do have a few series that they haven't killed yet that I would want to see. Apparently, they keep your profile and settings for 10 months. This suggests that I'm not the only one shopping around.
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
Do you mean original as in first-as-a-series, or original as in something that hasn't been made for tv/movies yet? If the latter, there are tons:
- The Expanse
- American Gods, Good Omens
- Kingkiller Chronicles (being produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda)
- Wheel of Time
However, if you mean the former, then I agree, although there are new shows, they just don't have high budgets like those with followings already.