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Neil Gaiman wrote:What glorious (and dangerous) trouble will our favorite angel and demon find themselves in this time? Good news! #GoodOmens is returning for Season 2 on @PrimeVideo.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Can’t get his blog thingy to load. Could someone be a dear and do a copy pasta?
I was just considering that...
Spoiler:
REALLY BLOODY EXCELLENT OMENS... POSTED BY NEIL GAIMAN AT 7:57 AM
Many, many years ago (it was Hallowe'en 1989, for the curious, the year before Good Omens was published) Terry Pratchett and I were sharing a room at the World Fantasy Convention in Seattle, to keep the costs down, because we were both young authors, and taking ourselves to America and conventions were expensive. It was a wonderful convention. I remember a huge Seattle second-hand bookstore in which I found a dozen or so green-bound Storisende Edition James Branch Cabell books, each signed so neatly by the author that the bookshop people assured me that the signatures were printed, and really ten dollars a book was the correct price.
I could afford books. Good Omens had just been sold to UK publishers and then to US publishers for more money than Terry or I had ever received for anything. (Terry had been incredibly worried about this, certain that receiving a healthy advance would mean the end of his career. When his career didn't end, Terry suggested to his agent that perhaps he ought to be getting that kind of advance for every book from now on, and his life changed, and he stopped having to share a hotel room to save money. But I digress.) Advance reading copies of Good Omens had not yet gone out, but a few editors had read it (ones who had bid for it but failed to buy it) and they all seemed very excited about it, and thrilled for us.
On the Saturday evening Terry left the bar quite early and headed off to bed. I stayed up talking to people and having a marvelous time, hung in there until the small hours of the morning when they closed the hotel bar and all the people went away, and then headed up to the hotel room room.
I opened the door as quietly as I could and tiptoed in the dark across the room to where my bed was located.
I'd just reached the bed when, from the far side of the room, a voice said, “What time of the night do you call this then? Your mother and I have been worried sick about you.”
Terry was wide awake. Jet lag had taken its toll.
And I was wide awake too. So we lay in our respective beds and having nothing else to do, we plotted the sequel to Good Omens. It was a good one, too. We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD™ and there wasn't ever a good time.
But we never forgot it.
It's been thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel. (I got to use bits of the sequel in the TV series version of Good Omens -- that's where our angels came from.)
Terry was clear on what he wanted from Good Omens on the telly. He wanted the story told, and if that worked, he wanted the rest of the story told.
So in September 2017 I sat down in St James' Park, beside the director, Douglas Mackinnon, on a chair with my name on it, as Showrunner of Good Omens. The chair slowly and elegantly lowered itself to the ground underneath me and fell apart, and I thought, that's not really a good omen. Fortunately, under Douglas's leadership, that chair was the only thing that collapsed.
So, once Good Omens the TV series had been released by Amazon and the BBC, to global acclaim, many awards and joy, Rob Wilkins (Terry's representative on Earth) and I had the conversation with the BBC and Amazon about doing some more. And they got very excited. We talked to Michael Sheen and David Tennant about doing some more. They also got very excited. We told them a little about the plot. They got even more excited.
What it was mostly like shooting Good Omens: peering into screens while something happened round the corner.
I'd been a fan of John Finnemore's for years, and had had the joy of working with him on a radio show called With Great Pleasure, where I picked passages I loved, had amazing readers read them aloud and talked about them.
I asked John if he'd be willing to work with me on writing the next round of Good Omens, and was overjoyed when he said yes. We have some surprise guest collaborators too. And Douglas Mackinnon is returning to oversee the whole thing with me.
So that's the plan. We've been keeping it secret for a long time (mostly because otherwise my mail and Twitter feeds would have turned into gushing torrents of What Can You Tell Us About It? long ago) but we are now at the point where sets are being built in Scotland (which is where we're shooting, and more about filming things in Scotland soon), and we can't really keep it secret any longer.
There are so many questions people have asked about what happened next (and also, what happened before) to our favourite Angel and Demon. Here are, perhaps, some of the answers you've been hoping for.
As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop.
(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying “Let there be Light”.)
Delighted for more certainly. The lack of source material is obviously a concern, but everything about the production has had a focus on Gaiman working to honor his late friend. I don't see that changing now as long as Gaiman remains involved.
When the [first] series came out, Neil G did say he and Terry P had loads of extra material they wanted to use.
The ending did leave room for more, what with the package from Agnes, etc.
As my Facebook reply to Neil G's announcement goes:
"We're just rewatching the current one. The reply when I texted about this was: "Wtf really????" and "Yess!!!!"
As a fellow Gaimanite has just reminded me, "more Anathema" so I'm changing my take to, Uh, we had a slight kneejerk malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/06/29 16:00:31
"AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
I wonder if the 'second book/sequel' will really ever get written and only be the second season of the show. I had read "Good Omens" well before the series came out and would certainly like there to be a second book and not just TV season 2.
Loved the book and tv show but enoyed the Prachtet syle elements the most - crossed fingers its good!
I AM A MARINE PLAYER
"Unimaginably ancient xenos artefact somewhere on the planet, hive fleet poised above our heads, hidden 'stealer broods making an early start....and now a bloody Chaos cult crawling out of the woodwork just in case we were bored. Welcome to my world, Ciaphas."
Inquisitor Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos
"I will admit that some Primachs like Russ or Horus could have a chance against an unarmed 12 year old novice but, a full Battle Sister??!! One to one? In close combat? Perhaps three Primarchs fighting together... but just one Primarch?" da001
Mr Morden wrote: Loved the book and tv show but enoyed the Prachtet syle elements the most - crossed fingers its good!
I’d actually be ok with it not being terribly Pratchett. I’ll do my best explain why.
PTerry was an absolute one off. Nobody can replace. Nobody can convincingly mimic him. His writing was from his heart. His view on the world, his own peculiar and particular politics.
What made Good Omens work was the collaboration. Two writers sharing a story and egging each other on. Achieve new heights of their own craft by bouncing off each other.
Neil Gaiman (sorry, I feel uncomfortable referring to people I’ve not met by single names or nicknames) is seemingly on a new collab for this season, albeit based on his and PTerry’s chit chat late at night many many years ago.
To have him pick a PTerry imitator would be a disservice. He needs to find someone who can bring fresh ideas. A new narrative to a very funny tale.
Even PTerry’s daughter, given custodianship over his works has chosen not to let anyone else add to it ‘in PTerry’s style”
It doesn’t have to be As Good, for me. It just needs to be Good. I have faith in Neil Gaiman to know what that might look like. There’s no shame in it being different.
Fed up of Scalpers? But still want your Exclusives? Why not join us?
Given that the new co-writer they've brought in is John Finnemore, I think it's in good hands, his previous work (aside from being generally excellent radio comedy) has had a distinctly Pratchetty flavour at times, a lot of it comes back to very dry wit and poking fun at the absurdity of human nature just as well as Sir Terry himself. I believe he also has writing credits for things like That Mitchell and Webb Look, which again, is very much in that english comedy tradition.
He also wrote the amazing sitcom Cabin Pressure, worth tracking down a) because it's got some great character comedy writing that definitely bodes well for Good Omens 2 and b) for a pre-fame Benedict Cumberbatch, before he was typecast as weird smart posh men all the time, playing a role very far removed from his more famous ones.
It'll be very different to Pratchett's writing, I imagine, but similar enough in overall tone that it won't be jarring, and I do think that the show's premise needs very observant character comedy writer to balance Gaiman's high concept stuff, and John Finnemore definitely brings that.
If anyone wants more Tennant and Sheen excellence in the mean time, I cannot recommed their lockdown sitcom Staged enough. Series 1 is on Netflix, 2 is on BBC Iplayer in the UK at least, not sure if it's made it to Netflix yet. .Brilliant stuff.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/06/29 20:32:47
Gaiman's never terribly impressed me, so we-saved-the-world-and-solved-everything-but-here's-a-mysterious-stranger-down-the-pub is an inauspicious beginning.