#though fwiw I do think the relationship was basically doomed from that point. something would have happened sooner or later

[laylainalaska]

Good Omens TV

So I watched the Good Omens TV adaptation, and my reaction was decidedly mixed. Parts of it worked for me, and parts really didn’t. If you loved every minute of it, there may be squee harshing under the readmore, but I really did love parts of it! So YMMV.

FWIW, I haven’t read the book in a really long time, and had actually forgotten a lot of the specifics of the book plot, which was a good way to watch the miniseries! So a lot of the plot was effectively new to me, while I also remembered it as it went along from the book, and that was really fun. I actually thought some of the scenes were new for the movie and then rediscovered that they actually were in the book, it’s just that I never paid much attention to anything going on with Newt and Anathema and most of what happened with the kids. Oops. >_> (I actually found the kids’ scenes a lot more engaging in the movie than in the book. The child actors were really fun.)

I guess I’ll just get what I didn’t like out of the way first -- the way the entire series was filmed and acted in such an OTT, stage-acting kind of way was really, really not my thing. This is entirely down to personal taste because it’s not like I can say it’s out of keeping with the book, but I think the version of the book in my head had a lot more ... gravitas? solemnity? It’s hard to say -- whatever that quality is, this adaptation didn’t have nearly enough of it, and I found parts of it so cringey that I had to look away (e.g. the possession scene with Madame Tracy). And I think this largely comes down to the book being more dramatic and less silly in my head, which I was never going to get from an adaptation, so that’s fair enough.

But even leaving aside what it did to the gravitas of the show/book, the humor, I felt, was also undermined by the extreme hamminess of the acting, as well as by the adaptation’s need to explain the jokes or hold up a big sign saying THIS IS FUNNY. It would’ve been more genuinely funny if it had been underplayed a bit. Some of the jokes still land really well, usually the ones that are delivered in deadpan or not actually explained. The book is so funny in large part because the humor is so downplayed.

But the over-explaining ... it’s things like, for example, the scene with Agnes’s skirts blowing up everyone was darkly funny all on its own; it didn’t need an immediate explanation in the narration that there was dynamite in her skirts. It worked great in the books because you couldn’t see it, but the explanation becomes redundant and just feels like we’re getting the joke explained. Or the bit with the unicorns running around in the background in the Noah’s Ark scene, which is a lot funnier when you just notice them on your own and it’s this low-key silly thing happening behind the characters, but gets a lot less funny once the characters notice them and start pointing out the unicorns running away. It wasn’t just one or two instances; a lot of the humor in the movie was like that. I was rereading bits of the book last night and noticing all over again that I really prefer the book’s style of deadpan, underplayed humor.

And since I’m being salty anyway, I gotta say, I am going to be forever salty, or at least baffled, that my very favorite scene from the book isn’t in the movie -- baffled, in large part, because it’s an important scene and a very cinematic scene, and they just ... didn’t do it? It’s the bit during the climax when Crowley and Aziraphale are just like “fuck it” and spread their wings and prepare to throw themselves at the Powers That Be of heaven and hell even though they’re certainly gonna die. I mean, it was kind of in there, but they took that doomed-last-stand image that I loved and instead had a scene with the two of them coaxing Adam into changing things. The wing-spreading scene and the sword flaming up were just so dramatic in the book, and maybe it was more dramatic in my head than it could ever have been in the movie, and I guess the entire “willing to die for their cause” aspect is already implied by everything Aziraphale and Crowley have done up to that point, but damn it, I wanted that.

Okay, so you’re probably wondering now what I actually liked about it, but the answer is, quite a lot! I appreciate that it was such a close and faithful adaptation of the book; sure, they left out a few things, and some of the ways they imagined it into life were not at all how I’ve imagined it all these years, but that’s not the fault of the adaptation. I still feel like Sheen and Tennant’s Aziraphale and Crowley are not quite my Aziraphale and Crowley, but I was way more sold on them than I expected to be, and in particular, Tennant’s Crowley, while not precisely book Crowley (rereading the book last night reminded me how much more low-key he typically is), is a really delightful Crowley. I still think I might prefer the book’s more buttoned-down Crowley, but I ended up appreciating them both a lot in different ways, and particularly loved how much emotion and conflictedness TV!Crowley has with his relationship with Hell and falling and Aziraphale and generally being a decent person doing demon things. I think a lot of what’s there subtextually in book!Crowley is right out in the open in TV!Crowley, which goes along with the TV version being a lot less subtle in general, but this is one of the places where it really worked for me.

And just in general, getting so much more with Aziraphale and Crowley, so many new scenes actually written by their (co)creator was absolutely delightful. It really felt like getting, if not a whole new novel, then at least a new novella or a series of short stories about them, focused on them and their relationship in the best possible way. I think knowing the adaptation was written by Gaiman made a lot of difference here, because things like Crowley calling Aziraphale his best friend, and his utter distress and misery when he thinks Aziraphale is dead (and it’s not even dead dead, just gone and on the opposite side), is an extra gut-punch because of knowing that this isn’t just someone running off with it in filmed fanfic; this feels like the actual characters doing it, part of the bookverse creator’s view of their relationship, and that does matter to me. “You killed my best friend” - I just never would have thought we’d ever get that much emotion between them, and it kills me in the best way.

The new stuff at the end was also extra delightful because of that same “this could potentially be book canon and not just TV canon” feeling, and because it was new, so I didn’t know where it was going, and then the trickster-ish swap was so good.

I also remember reading beforehand that Sheen had said he tried to play Aziraphale being in love with Crowley, and I, er, wasn’t expecting it to be so obvious. The fact that he absolutely loves and adores Crowley is vividly clear in every scene they’re in, even if his words are saying something entirely different.

I mean, I had my problems with the adaptation and they were significant ones, but the entire thing was basically a big ginormous love letter to Aziraphale and Crowley and the fact that, whatever form that love might take, they absolutely love the hell (and heaven) out of each other. That aspect was not only not downplayed in the adaptation, it was absolutely its core and its heart. And whatever problems I had with how it was done, at the end of the day I got my live-action Aziraphale and Crowley Show that I’ve wanted for 20 years, and it made me feel really good and rekindled my affection for them in the best way.