Why Good Omens season 1 has already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish
Neil Gaiman said he wouldn't make a sequel to Good Omens
Neil Gaiman at SXSW in Austin, Texas in 2019:
[Gaiman also confirmed the series will only be six episodes, with no intention of trying to go for another season if successful. "The lovely thing about Good Omens is it has a beginning, it has a middle, and it has an end," he said to appreciative applause. "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens. It's brilliant. It finishes. You have six episodes and we're done. We won't try to build in all these things to try to let it continue indefinitely."]
Source: Entertainment Weekly (2019)
"It's a buddy road movie through time."
2018 - Neil Gaiman on X- Twitter
Tweet link here
Also Neil Gaiman in 2023:
["It won't be confirmed unless enough people watch Season 2 to make Amazon happy...
...But obviously Season 3 is all planned and plotted and, if I get to make it, will take the story and the people in it we care about to a satisfying end."]
What happened?
Were the profits and ratings high enough to create two more seasons out of thin air? At this point, seasons 2 and 3 seem more like a greedy stretching of a beloved story already told in its entirety in the first season.
Has the first season already fulfilled Sir Terry Pratchett's wish?
As read above, Neil Gaiman himself said: "Season 1 of Good Omens is Good Omens."
Gaiman was very opened about how pleased he was with Season 1 and how he made it having Sir Terry Pratchett's wish in mind.
Interview for The Verge (May 30, 2019)
Link : Neil Gaiman had one rule for the Good Omens adaptation: making Terry Pratchett happy
Interviewer: Do you feel pressure from knowing this has to be the definitive best adaptation it could be?
Gaiman: No. All I wanted to do was to make something Terry would have liked. It wasn’t like, “Make the best thing.”...
...Gaiman: The lovely thing about Good Omens [the miniseries] is that it’s still Good Omens. If you loved the book, this is that thing that you loved. And I will make you fall in love even more with Sergeant Shadwell. I will make you fall even more in love with Newt than you thought you could, I hope. It does demonstrate that I do kind of know what I’m talking about, which is a nice thing to know.
...Gaiman: So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isn’t completely different from the original. It’s not out of left field.
Neil Gaiman on an interview for The Guardian in 2019.
Link: Neil Gaiman: ‘Good Omens feels more apt now than it did 30 years ago’
There are times, he insists, when “you make something you like so much that you don’t really care what anyone else thinks of it.” There’s a clue to this, perhaps, in the show’s final frame, which reads “For Terry”. “He didn’t believe in heaven or hell or anything like that,” Gaiman says, “so there wasn’t even a hope that there was a ghostly Terry around to watch it. He would have been grumpy if there was. But I made it for him.”
Why was Good Omens season 1 so good and you could really feel Sir Terry Pratchett's contributions?
Gaiman himself has already told us the answer:
...Gaiman: So with Good Omens, I feel like what I got to do was put the thing I made with Terry on the screen and then buttress it. What I added isn’t completely different from the original. It’s not out of left field.
Neil Gaiman for The Verge (2019).
There was original material to work with (Good Omens, published in 1990), on which we certainly know that Sir Terry Pratchett himself actively worked from start to finish.
Is there a proper sequel to Good Omens the book on which to base 2 more seasons of the series?
Neil Gaiman says the following on an interview for GQ in 2019.
Link: Neil Gaiman Says No to Adapting His Own Books—Except This Time
...But with this, it was like: Okay. Terry is gone. He wanted me to do this. He wanted me to do it for him. And that gave me a kind of weird impetus. And it meant that I felt very much at liberty to take every conversation that Terry and I had ever had about Good Omens. Not just the book, as written, but everything beyond it. We planned a sequel, never written, so I got to steal the angels from the sequel. I got to steal from every conversation Terry and I had about how we would do this. It felt very personal, and I guess kind of… holy. If that doesn’t sound too ridiculous. But it was a mission.
Two conclusions can be drawn:
1) Informal conversations about the plot of a sequel do not equate to an officially written sequel.
2) Neil Gaiman has already used many of the ideas he and Terry Pratchett had planned for a never-written sequel to Good Omens and those ideas were largely added to and executed in the TV adaptation of Good Omens (2019).
Why keep stretching those ideas if the co-writer is no longer able to actively contribute and help to create a proper sequel?
If Gaiman were the sole creator of Good Omens we'd have a different conversation, but that's not the case. The first season of Good Omens was already a beautiful homage to Good Omens and Sir Terry Pratchett's work on the book.
Did Terry Pratchett write around 75% of Good Omens?
Link for the post here.
Link for the post talking about the video and sharing the video here.
Edit: I wanted to bring this point up to point out Terry Pratchett's important contribution to the making of the book, not to highlight it as an excuse to distance Gaiman from the novel. We will have to accept that he also contributed to the creation of the book.
Sir Terry Pratchett's last wish
2017 - Rob Wilkins on Twitter (X)
Terry Pratchett’s Unpublished Work Crushed by Steamroller
By Sophie Haigney - The New York Times
Terry Pratchett, the well-known British fantasy author, had a wish fulfilled two years after his death: A hard drive containing his unpublished work was destroyed by steamroller.
Mr. Pratchett, a wildly popular fantasy novelist who wrote more than 70 books, including the “Discworld” series, died at 66 in 2015. That year his friend, the writer Neil Gaiman, told The Times of London that Mr. Pratchett had wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all.” Mr. Gaiman added at the time that he was glad this hadn’t happened.
Now, though, it has. Mr. Pratchett’s estate manager and close friend, Rob Wilkins, posted a picture of a hard drive and a steamroller on Aug. 25 on an official Twitter account they shared.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Wilkins wrote that the deed was done.
I have not been able to find the exact reasons why Sir Terry Pratchet wanted his unfinished and unpublished works destroyed, but we can respect his last wish as a way for him to have control over what he felt he was ready to share with the world and what he was not.
Is Good Omens the exception?
With all that has been presented so far, I can only conjecture, but not be sure. I can believe that there was Terry Pratchett's permission and desire to make an adaptation of Good Omens, the original book published in 1990, but to my mind, creating two more seasons of a never-written sequel doesn't fit as part of Terry Pratchett's desire.
He is not among us to actively participate in a sequel and if his last wish was to destroy his unfinished works, I can't believe that he would have wanted to give his approval to something new published under his name and without his supervision.
Sir Terry Pratchett talking about a never-written sequel to Good Omens
“Neil and I thought about a sequel an awful lot initially. We talked about it on tour. And I think it was a big relief to both of us, when one day we looked one another in the eye and said, 'I thought you wanted to do a sequel.'..
Interview for the Magazine Locus. Locusmag archive page
This is me speculating, but I don't think there was real enthusiasm for creating a sequel until Gaiman alone saw profitable potential in the TV adaptation....
Good Omens also belongs to the those who love the story
I think it's okay to still love the story of Good Omens. Personally, I will always be grateful with the story and the characters for giving me confort in troubling times, but I find seasons 2 and 3 as some kind of excuse from Gaiman to keep profiting and benefiting from the story (more now than ever due to the SA allegations*).
Aziraphale and Crowley will always live happily in a lovely cottage as long as we want to. Even before season 2 was announced, many of us had already accepted that. Many artists have imagined lovely endings for our innefable husbands and in my eyes their works won't be any less valuable than whatever Gaiman had planned.
Note:
I don't like talking about Season 3 of GO without mentioning the current SA allegations against Neil Gaiman (Main writer of seasons 2 and 3 and showrunner), so in case you want to know more about the allegations against Neil Gaiman. Here there's a great Round Up link (Podcasts links, transcripts, etc.)
Credits for the Round Up link to Muccamukk. Thanks a lot!
*more thoughts on supporting season 3
