Neil Gaiman Talks About the Difficulty of Getting ‘Good Omens’ Adapted
Recently at SXSW, the cast of Good Omens and writer Neil Gaiman showed off some new clips from the upcoming series. In discussing the show’s origins, Gaiman discussed the difficulty he had getting the novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett adapted for the screen.
Gaiman and Pratchett’s tongue-in-cheek fantasy novel about an angel and demon working together to stop the coming apocalypse was published in 1990, and proved an odd enough story that finding an on-screen home for it was difficult, according to Gaiman.
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, he described the project as:
“Impossible but we managed to do it somehow anyway… Pratchett and I could both picture this thing. We went out and talked to a lot of writers of television we admired and said, ‘Would you like to do this?’ and they explained that they wouldn’t, because… they couldn’t quite get a grip on it and couldn’t see how you could do it without changing it too much.”
He also talked about the effect that the death of Pratchett, his long-time friend, had on his feelings towards adapting the novel:
“I was probably ready to just let it slide but Terry wrote to me and said, ‘You’re the only person who has the same amount of love for Good Omens as I do and you understand it and you have to make this so I can see it before I die.’ And then he died. Which left it as this awful last request. I had to do it.”
However, at last, the series has apparently finally found a home on Amazon Prime. It’s set to be a six-episode mini-series that will tell the full and complete story of the novel without any follow-ups.
Good Omens stars David Tennant, Michael Sheen, Adria Arjona, John Hamm, Brian Cox, Frances McDormand and Benedict Cumberbatch, and will premiere on Amazon Prime on May 31st.