We probably haven’t seen the last of Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale and David Tennant’s Crowley. Speaking to Digital Spy over the weekend, Neil Gaiman said the odds of there being more of Good Omens the TV show are “pretty good.”
“It’s not like anybody doesn’t want to make more Good Omens,” the writer and co-executive producer told the publication. “We just need to figure out how and when and all of the various ifs, and sort everything out.”
He added that the main deterrents are all the obstacles imposed on the entertainment industry by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “But we’d all love to do it,” he continued, “so it’s really just a matter of seeing if we can actually make that happen in the world, if we can make the time happen, if we can work it with everybody’s schedule. I know I’m not the only person who wants to see more Crowley and Aziraphale.”
The big question here is what another season (or more) of the Amazon/BBC co-production would look like. At six episodes, the TV adaptation wrapped up the plot of Good Omens the novel, written by Gaiman and the late Sir Terry Pratchett. While the authors did have plans for a sequel, entitled 668: The Neighbor of the Beast, the book never came to fruition. But the good news is, they had made some progress prior to Pratchett’s passing.
“Once we had finished writing Good Omens, back in the dawn of prehistory, Terry Pratchett and I started plotting a sequel,” Gaiman told Radio Times in 2017, adding that “it was about where the angels actually came from.”
Speaking to Variety in February 2019, Gaiman revealed that a good deal of material intended for the sequel ended up in the show. “That stuff allowed us to actually solve some of the problems involved in putting it on television – the fact that we have Jon Hamm as the impossibly irritating angel Gabriel is something from the sequel we slid back in – [as was] the relationship between heaven and hell, where we keep going back and forth between these two appalling places,” he told the publication, adding three months later that “a lot of the trappings and the idea of what propelled book two into existence wound up integral to what I did in Good Omens the TV series.”
Then, in September 2019, the writer revealed on his blog that not only is there a novel’s worth of story, but he also has Pratchett’s blessing for putting it out there. “There is an entire novel plot that nobody knows about, and Terry was absolutely in favour of that story being told,” he wrote. “Whether or not we do it depends on a lot of factors though. (Of which my time is a big one.)”
We’ll know more as TV and film productions begin the slow climb to recovery from the coronavirus. In the meantime, feast your eyes and ears on some lockdown-inspired Crowley and Aziraphale ASMR, revisit Good Omens devotee Emmet Asher-Perrin’s ode to the Ineffable Husbands, or check out the latest on what’s going on with Gaiman’s other blockbuster page-to-TV adaptation.
