The book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is one of my all-time favorites. I used to keep a battered paperback copy in my car as emergency reading material (I have a much nicer hardback that I keep on the shelves at home…), because there’s almost no mood in which I wouldn’t be willing to read bits of it more or less at random.

I was a little nervous when I heard it was being adapted for the screen, but, you know, we’re endlessly hearing about how this is a Golden Age of Prestige Television, and Amazon clearly threw some money at it, so I was somewhat hopeful. Also, I have Amazon Prime already, so I didn’t have to make any special effort to see this, but could stream it in between dinner and bedtime.

Anyway, I’ve now watched it, and… it’s fine. There are bits that work, and bits that don’t, and on balance, it’s perfectly enjoyable but not brilliant. Explaining more than that, though, will require spoilers, so here’s some space to protect the eyes of anybody who’s watching this more slowly than I am.

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So, the fundamental problem with this show is the change of medium from book to screen. The book is, well, very much a book, and takes advantage of its book-ness to do a lot of things that are awkward on screen: it jumps around to visit lots of places for brief jokes, it depends fairly heavily on describing people’s internal mental states, and many of its best lines are asides from the narrative voice (which, as with pretty much all of Pratchett’s books, is one of its most charming features, but not a specifically identifiable character).

The adaptation was done by Gaiman himself, and it’s hard to tell whether the problems are in spite of or because of that. The show tries to keep the narrative asides by adding a voiceover narrator (Frances McDormand, who explicitly self-identifies as God at one point, which is its own problem), but that’s a really awkward device in a visual medium. While the narration does allow them to do more jumping around than otherwise, it often feels like it’s working WAY too hard to hang onto particularly beloved bits of description from the book. That undercuts the effect quite a bit.

It occurs to me as I’m writing this that there’s probably an instructive contrast to be drawn between Gaiman adapting this and William Goldman’s script for the Princess Bride adapting his own novel. The movie keeps the spirit of the book, but radically restructures it in a lot of ways to get that spirit on screen in a way that’s true to the medium. It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but I recall noticing that a number of jokes that, in the book, are part of the narrative frame get into the movie by becoming lines of dialogue. The “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” bit from the movie is the example that sticks in my mind.

Gaiman isn’t Goldman. Which, you know, isn’t actually that surprising, because Goldman was insanely good his craft, so “Not as good as William Goldman” covers the vast majority of people ever to try their hand at writing for the screen. But the transition between media takes a lot of the narration from “charming” to “clunky,” and I can’t help wishing they’d found another way.

The other, related issue has to do with the Them. A lot of the book centers around Adam Young, the mislaid Antichrist, and his gang of friends, all of whom are about the age that SteelyKid is right now. This stuff works very well in the book, capturing the energy and inventiveness of a bunch of idealized eleven-year-olds, with bonus dryly amused adult commentary from the aforementioned narrator. (Admittedly, I haven’t re-read it since SteelyKid moved into this sort of age group, but my memory of the adventures of the Them maps pretty well onto the experience of having SteelyKid and The Pip in the house…)

This works well on the page, because a book doesn’t need to involve any actual children. The descriptions of the Them and their adventures can remain a bit vague, and the reader can fill in the details. On screen, though, you need actual kids to play those roles, and then you run into the problem that it’s really hard to find child actors who can do scripted dialogue and make it feel natural. I mean it’s hard to find adults who can do this, too, but there’s at least a larger pool to draw from if you need an actor to play somebody between 20 and 50 than if you want a pre-teen, and time for them to build a resume that can tell you if they’ll fit.

Which is not to say that the kids are bad as child actors go. They’re just a little stiff, which is probably inevitable given how much of those scenes depend on very precise turns of phrase that work a lot better when you’re reading them and can imagine the proper inflection than when you have to memorize them and say them on cue. Everything feels very rehearsed, and that contrasts very sharply with some of the adult performances.

(Also, the sequences with the Them have a very stage-y feel, like they were shooting in extremely limited space, forcing kids who in the book are very high-energy to stand eerily still most of the time. They’re also altogether too clean and put-together for the sort of kids they’re supposed to be, especially Brian.)

(Also, just as an aside, the costumer isn’t doing England any favors. Until a late bit of narration, I had forgotten that the whole thing takes place in summer, largely because everyone is wearing layers upon layers of clothes. I mean, I’ve been in London in August, and the climate isn’t that dreary…)

These points are driven home a bit by the very best sequences of the show, which are original to the adaptation and thus written expressly for the screen. They also primarily involve the adult characters, and the acting performances there are very good to excellent. The very best bit is the opening of the third episode, an extended sequence following Crowley and Aziraphale through the centuries, from Biblical events up through recent human history. David Tennant and Michael Sheen are terrific together, and make even the more absurd moments of their respective plots feel natural. There’s also some good stuff by Michael McKean as Shadwell, Miranda Richardson as Madame Tracey, and especially Jon Hamm’s archangel Gabriel (whose whole plot line is great, and almost entirely original to the show).

So, you know, as I said above, it’s… fine. It’s a very competent adaptation of a difficult-to-adapt work, which works well in places, less well in others, and has a few really entertaining performances. It was a pleasant enough way to pass a few hours, even if it doesn’t do full justice to (my memory of) the book.