Good Omens - the Amazon show.

There is a feeling I get while watching Good Omens which I had a hard time putting my finger on. It wasn’t a good feeling, it wasn’t revulsion, it was a lead weight in my head. 

Leigh and I watch tv while eating. We’ve been doing this for years. In the old days we watched what was to offer. Now days we can pick from a wide range of shows. We started watching Good Omens, because Amazon Prime told us to.

The show starts with the smarmy voice over of god giving us background on what is going to happen. Then it goes on to tell us a bunch of stuff that we need to know. Setting the scene so that we don’t have questions later on when things come up. The show is the story of the end of world, but more importantly it’s about the friendship between two divine beings. One that is “good”, one that is “bad”. Both are lackadaisical about their jobs and treat their respective alignment as a bare minimum to follow. Because of their incompetence, Armageddon doesn’t go as planned. 

So far so good, right? The show proceeds to continue the smarmy narrations, the scenes that go nowhere, and the hammy jokes and acting by pretty competent actors. I’m at the point where the four horse persons of the apocalypse show up to an American military base in the UK to start WWIII. I think this climax of the show because it ends on a cliff hanger. It’s the most anti climactic moment of the show. Leigh’s been bored for a while, I usually hang on to these types of shows because I’m a nerd. The episode is fumbling towards the cliff hanger and I’m losing interest in what happens. I’m not going to watch the finale (is it? Because the label on the show says “Season 1”). 

So what went wrong? Mostly the jokes and the cool setups are more important than telling a compelling story. The story? Is it about these two divines? There is a bunch of Dr Who level drama going on here but not much else. Are their friendship challenged? Do they have to do anything to fulfill their desires? Will this end up like Brokeback Mountain where the characters fall into the deep grooves that society has formed denying them fulfilment? I have no idea. I was so distracted by everything in this show that I have no idea what it’s about. Ok how about nurture v.s nature? Is evil inborn or is it environmental? That whole thread in the story is ham fistedly handled, and not really explored. The hypocrisy of god? The stupidity of evil? It’s all in there. And everything is a joke, so we know they are too clever to really believe anything.  

I realised that the feeling I was having was that I was wasting my time. Even at a low attention time as eating dinner while watching a show, this show has nothing of value. I gain nothing from consuming it. It has no calories, good or bad. It leaves you empty and angry at your self for burning a few precious hours.

The lesson for me as a creative:

1) don’t make pointless scenes. If you’re going to have colour scenes, make them quick and between the significant one. Have every scene change something in the story world, the characters or the watcher.

2) Pick a side. Have an opinion. The devil child is good because he values friends above all else. Show that a little better, focus on that, less on bad guys with frogs on their heads. Or no, the kid ends up calling the end of the world because that’s who he is no matter what. 

3) Remove stuff when things get complicated. Remove the four horse persons. They were dumb. It was a plot device that made no sense, there for humor effects, not much else. They didn’t even know what to do in a room full of computers. Anyway, that’s not how the 4HoA work, they are harbingers, not causers. They appear to collect, not work. Delete that whole American Base scenes, do that pre climax different.

4) Do it now. The show waits for encounters to happen. For example the devil child and the four horse persons of the apocalypse should have happened way earlier - make that a confrontation that needs to happen right away. The show tries to set up these big moments, but end up with a series of pointless moments. The whole witch thread is like this, this enormous long setup so that at last episode (which I have haven’t watched) we can have a limp resolution. Cut the whole witch thread. It’s dumb, make that another show “How the witch of Malibu stopped the apocalypse by reading her great grandma’s diary!”

5) Jokes are hard to do. Don’t make complicated ones. Don’t put frogs on people’s heads to indicate they are evil. The show is depressing because everything is horrible (But that’s how the world is, Terry!). I think you need straightpersons in comedy - you need a road out of the insanity. I don’t know. 

The lesson as a consumer:

Don’t watch Terry Prachett anything. I wonder if his books is the same mix of smarmy narration and vapid characters, and Rube Goldberg stories that end up nowhere.