Sorry to absolutely everyone who was let down by the disaster that was the end of the Good Omens TV show (hereafter called Showmens for ease of typing this barely coherent ramble) but I need to scream and cackle and monologue like a mad prophet whose awful visions have come true. "I warned you!" I shriek as the skies fall and the world ends, "I told you a man who cared more about Agnes Nutter's cottage than the dove resurrection couldn't be trusted!"
(And of course I should not leave it merely implied that Neil Gaiman should be in prison for his sex crimes, which are of infinitely more weight than anything I'm about to scream about here. I have nothing of value to add to that, but it should not be ignored.)
I still stand by that the original S1 Showmens was a good surface level adaptation of the book, but once you scratch below the surface, it did a fucking terrible job of adapting literally any of the themes of the book except the general value of humanity. It was kind of inevitable that Aziraphale and Crowley would become more major characters, especially since they'd been stealing the spotlight for nearly 30 years by the time of the show. I get it. What I don't get is how Gaiman managed to make Adam a supporting role in his own story. The Horsemen and the Them are there to be foils of one another; as someone more eloquent than me put it back in the day, the climax is a standoff between childhood innocence and the horrors of the world, and innocence wins. Life, Scuffles, Grubbiness, and Forgetting To Eat Because Something More Interesting Is Happening won against Death, War, Pollution and Famine. Adam used the lessons he'd learnt during play growing up as a human child to defeat the grand plans of Heaven and Hell. Shifting the focus from that to the part afterwards where where Crowley and Aziraphale bamboozle their bosses with bullshit was a major misstep imo, but it just one of a series of decisions than makes the whole of Showmens lesser than the book it's based off.
But okay let's talk about Aziraphale and Crowley, since that's all the show wants to do. The real crux of the story is humanity, and how Aziraphale and Crowley are just people. In the book, the angel accidentally killed a dove and the demon intentionally revived it! Do I need to say anything else? When Crowley was first handed the newborn Antichrist, he considered just throwing the thing as far as he could and trying to flee the consequences of killing the boss's kid. Instead he took the baby to the hospital as instructed. When Aziraphale found the location of the Antichrist 11 years later, he did his damnedest to convince an old man to shoot the kid dead "for the greater good". They're complicated disasters of people and that's the point, they're human!
In Showmens, God is watching, narrating, and explaining everything. It's all going according to Her plan. It was a lazy choice to get exposition and Pratchett narration into the show (a crutch the radio show did not rely on, even though it would have had more of an excuse to do so) and it immediately undermined the entire humanist message of the book. Aziraphale and Crowley are no longer fighting against every power in the universe for their love of Earth, but are just following God's ineffable plan. A huge point of the book was that even if God is real, there isn't going to be any grand miracle to save us. We need to cherish the world we have and each other. No higher power is going to fix it, we need to do it ourselves. There's a reason why Adam, avatar of humanity, tells the powers that be to stop interfering, we have to trust people to figure things out on their own.
And now I finally have the quote from a Pratchett interview I was sure existed but couldn't find in 2019 (thank you @laudnumdrinker) "There couldn't be blood on Adam's hands, even blood spilled by third parties. No-one should die because he was alive." which made me so unhappy about the execution scene in hell. I understand the narrative utility of having a minor demon killed to show the holy water worked, but it went directly against one of the most important aspect of the book, which is that Everyone Is Alright at the end. Everyone got their happy ending as a nightingale sang in Berkley Square.
It has been said by many book fans for many years that part of the brilliance of Good Omens was that Pratchett and Gaiman were brave enough and good enough writers to have an all powerful 11 year old save the day in a way that felt perfectly earned and narratively and thematically satisfying, where a weaker author would have fallen for cynicism. A lesser author would not have been able to write a coming of age story for the Antichrist which let him keep his childhood joy and innocence.
And now we know that we were wrong. Pratchett was the author who was brave enough to write that. Gaiman is the lesser author who can't write the beautiful, moving love letter to humanity which is Good Omens. He can only write a cynical, defanged shadow of it, and I'm sorry to everyone who only saw that at the very end.
