I think a corporate angle would have been a potentially good replacement, but I don’t think the adaptation did nearly enough ground work to shift the allegory to that. In fact I think it dumped the corporate characterisation and metaphor that was already there.
It makes total sense that if your adaptation is not going to be a period piece, you need to find new systems and conflicts to ground the fantasy is real tensions we have a nuanced/relatable/pre-coded understanding of.
But for me all the series did was give a slight facelift to the more overt parts of the Cold War/intelligence/espionage angle, missing the fact that it wasn’t just a cute running joke you could cut with a few quick snips, but really baked into the characterisation, world-building and story.
So what you are left with is a bunch of stuff that all made sense as contributing to a central metaphor and narrative, but this that removed is just… stuff. Why St. James’s Park? Why not? Look at this pretty shot of Buckingham Palace. Nuclear escalation? Well, it’s a good Armageddon-ish threat, isn’t it? Doesn’t need to relate back to the theming of the early part of the narrative.
I won’t go on too much because I’ve covered this here in my very succinct and breezy 11,000 word dissertation-ette on this kind of stuff and how I think it lets down the Good Omens adaptation.
In the book, tying Aziraphale and Crowley to this Cold War espionage theme does a huge amount of the heavy lifting in setting up the mood, themes, characters, relationship and even plot.
It’s also much more than a le Carré riff. This is social coding, tying these characters into ‘types’ that British readers will get implicitly and immediately. Partly that’s from fiction, but it’s also from urban myth, folklore, culturally shared ideas. And, y’know, real life.
So when Pratchett and Gaiman (but mostly Pratchett I think) talk about ducks and fur collars and bus-based live drops and the café at the British Museum, they are tapping into a socially codified idea of What Spies and Spying is like which in turn builds an entire foundation of story and relationship story for us.
The big one is the relationship between angel and demon, as that is where the Cold War theming is focused. We understand within a few lines of their main-timeline first scene, by way of all the riffing around the spy stuff, the exact, emotionally specific, nature of their relationship; its status and tensions.
But in a corporate model, where is the template for the Aziraphale and Crowley relationship? To what do we relate this secret, tense friendship with high-stakes around its discovery and philosophical opposition? The series creators don’t seem to come up with anything. I can’t think of any attempt in the series to compare of code the pair of their interactions as anything. They exist on-screen only at a literal, textual level. They’re not like anything, at least anything which links up to any other element of the show.
On the textual level, obviously we have the same story: an angel and a demon have secretly formed a working relationship and friendship of convenience while continuing to work for opposing sides. But the way in which the book grounded that in a specific worldly narrative that we could connect to emotionally is lost.
There’s also how the Cold War stuff informs individual character. This is a bit complex and again I’m going to try not to get into it too much, because it’s here. This is where le Carré does come in, because he (alongside famous real cases like the Cambridge Ring) has taught us what British agents are like: English; upper-middle or upper-class; Cambridge-educated; terribly clever; superior; jaded; understated; sexually repressed.
Actually in the book one of the things the Cold-War-agents coding doesn’t do particularly is characterise Heaven and Hell themselves. We don’t see either directly, iirc. The book’s story positions Aziraphale and Crowley as isolated field agents, not really returning to home base – providing further emotional sense of why they have latched onto each other.
Rather, the Cold War stuff is used to establish the main characters and their relationship, the mood and tension of their shared world; it does not really play out in their individual sections or how Heaven and Hell are characterised. But the ways in which those things are drawn is compatible with it.
Because actually, in the book Crowley’s relationship with Hell, and Hell itself, is already created along corporate lines. Hell as an old, established form, perhaps financial, perhaps legal, very powerful but slightly befuddled by modern innovation and very impressed with the active, modern Crowley. Crucially this still works with the Cold War stuff because spy and 80s city boy are the same type: middle/upper-class, Cambridge-educated, clever, morally questionable, a certain amount of arrested public-school-ish-ness, anxiety.
Aziraphale too is characterised in a way that works both in the mood of Cold War espionage he and Crowley occupy together in the earlier sections, and the world of refined business owner he occupies independently. And the irony is that Aziraphale’s book characterisation could easily have worked within an updated corporate metaphor if that’s what they wanted. I’ve met many a book-Aziraphale in the publishing and bookselling industry. Posh, comfortable, intelligent, charming, gay. Another place you find a lot of book-Aziraphales is the BBC.
But the series actually moved away from the book versions of the characters who were already tied into corporate/business narratives and codes. They would have needed a freshen up of course.
But instead the series just dumps all of that, Cold War theming, corporate coding, and pushed its characters in a different direction that doesn’t link up to… anything really. The show’s Aziraphale and Crowley are purely fantastical figures. You will never meet people who look or act like this in any walk of like (well, maaayyybe Crowley; he could be read as a bit of a slightly washed-out rockstar or luvvie but again that choice doesn’t actually speak to a single other choice made in world-building or characterisation).
They certainly don’t feel like these are characters with a place in a narrative about disaffected employees.
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