Review: “Here’s what went wrong with Good Omens 3.”
Lots of interesting points in this piece. What do you think? Excerpts:
“What the new team should have done is rip up Gaiman’s scripts and start again from scratch, working from the original plot synopsis, to build something that was paced and structured like a feature film, since that was effectively what they were making. The finished episode feels less like a television film designed from the ground up than a brutal compression of something much larger.
“Maybe there wasn’t time. Maybe there wasn’t money. Instead they seem to have just highlighted key scenes from across the six scripts and scribbled out everything else, skipping huge amounts of necessary exposition and character development in order to gallop as fast as they can toward the finale.
“What story is left is about someone ripping pages out of a “Book of Life” and erasing things from existence, leaving the universe full of unexplained holes and missing people. That’s incredibly appropriate because it’s exactly what’s happened to the show itself.“
“couldn’t have been done properly. Amazon should have let the team shoot the whole thing as it was or else redeveloped it properly as a TV movie with the time and budget to start again on the script. Or else… not done it at all. Instead we got a patchwork mess that doesn’t do the original scripts or Pratchett and Gaiman’s original vision justice, full of visible scars and phantom limb syndrome from the uncomfortable amputations.
“The ending, as lovely a thing as it is, doesn’t redeem the rest of it. But it does mean the show ends honestly, which is more than most of us were expecting. We were, once upon a time, promised a Good Omens finale co-plotted by Terry Pratchett. Every failure here feels like a betrayal of that promise. It’s no coincidence that, on the rare occasion the finale works, it feels like it does so because someone thought about what Sir Terry would have wanted it to say.
“Still. A bitterly missed opportunity and a sad end to a series that shot for the stars and very, very nearly reached them.”