YMMV / Good Omens (2019)

• Accidental Aesop: Try not to trust hospitals that are religious, because they may mess up your healthcare due to their values.
• Actor Shipping: David Tennant and Michael Sheen, who play the main characters Crowley and Aziraphale, are often shipped together by the fandom due to their on-screen chemistry and being close friends in real life. It doesn't hurt that Sheen is very approving of the "Ineffable Husbands" (Crowley/Aziraphale).
• Adorkable:
  • Aziraphale is quite endearing, if sometimes a little bumbling. Special mention goes to him enthusiastically practicing his magic tricks. Newt also qualifies, with his excitement to share a joke about his car, his passion for computer programming (even though they always get destroyed), and his crush on Anathema.
  • Season two introduces Muriel, a low-ranked angel who gets caught up in the search for Gabriel. They're extremely sweet and friendly, and their terrible attempts to pose as a human police officer are even more endearing.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • There are a lot of ways you can interpret God in this series. Her seeming apathy towards humanity in Her actions (or lack thereof) is contrasted against her narration, where She seems genuinely fond of them. When Armageddon is averted, She doesn't seem upset by it, so is She being a Graceful Loser, or did it all go exactly as She hoped it would all along? Is Her lack of involvement in the conflicts between Heaven and Hell apathy, trusting Heaven to sort it out themselves, or does She believe in a Balance Between Good and Evil? If the latter, does She let Aziraphale and Crowley skirt the rules for this reason, knowing that they're essential to keeping the balance? A lot of questions are raised, and even the leads aren't sure what they think by the end.
  • Alternatively, to borrow the whole “poker in the dark” metaphor, She deals the cards, but how the hand is played, is up to the players. (Which would suggest that Her true plan put all the pieces in play so that “humans being humans” could cause the mix-up, insuring that the true Antichrist would be left alone to grow up like any other human, and therefore have a choice in his future.)
  • For that matter, did God really not know Aziraphale gave his sword away when She asked, or did She know and decide to let it slide? Or perhaps, did She know and actually approve of his actions?
  • Are Famine, War, and Pollution just horrible sadists? Or is it unfair to hold them to human morality, since (unlike the angels and demons), they are literally the personifications of the disasters they bring? (It should be noted that famine, war, and pollution are all human-created disasters — note that Pestilence retired after humans figured out medicine, and Death, the only Horseman who is just part of the natural order of things, really isn't evil at all.) Especially when the kids destroy them just by believing in their opposites, they really seem to be a manifestation of human flaw rather than beings with their own free will and motivations.
  • While Gabriel is undeniably a jerk, there are varying interpretations of just how MUCH of a jerk he is. He's eager to bring Armageddon upon the earth just so he can battle it out with the 'other side' to see who wins. He also tells 'Aziraphale' to shut up and die in hellfire. However, Gabriel — like most of the angels and demons on the show — hasn't spent much time on earth and clearly perceives humans as little better than ants, and so it's more understandable why he'd be willing to sacrifice them (well, us) all with no guilt in order to follow what he perceives to be the Great Plan. Also, Gabriel's 'with us or against us' attitude means that he sees Aziraphale as an enemy as soon as Aziraphale 'betrays' them. But before that, Gabriel does seem to at least try to be a good boss to those under him. Besides being just affable, he genuinely gives Aziraphale the benefit of the doubt many times while other angels were more ready to turn on him. He's also pretty effusive with his praise and he led the other angels into applauding Aziraphale's initiative in trying to make the anti-Christ baby not-evil, even though they all acknowledge that they think it won't work.
• Applicability: Aziraphale and Crowley's breakup at the end of season 2. Viewers relating to their own experience have interpreted Aziraphale's behavior as signs of religious trauma, and his return to Heaven being similar to a victim coming back to their abuser to be "redeemed"/"accepted". Crowley has also been compared to a person who's comfortable with their gender/sexuality, who has realized Heaven is an abusive family that would "accept" Aziraphale only if he's palatable to them.
• Awesome Music: The instrumental opening theme is quite beautiful — and it pops up everywhere once you know to listen for it. And, of course, the constant presence of The Greatest Hits of Queen, a holdover from a running gag in the book.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: If you haven't read the book, the appearance by Elvis Presley in Famine's first scene is completely meaningless. It also ignores that moving the story to the series' release year means that Elvis should be 84.
  • An example regardless of if you've read the book or not is two aliens showing up to tell Newt to spread the message of peace and good will between them, with said aliens not even knowing why they have to do this themselves. This all just leads to a joke about Shadwell telling Newt not to care since he's a witchfinder, and that he should have counted the aliens' nipples.
• Crack Pairing: Gabriel/Beelzebub fanfics and fanart have gained a fair amount of popularity on Tumblr, despite them being on opposite sides of the celestial battle and dead set against angel and demon friendships. Their ship name is "Ineffable Bureaucracy". Season two actually makes the ship canon with them bonding over their frustrations with their respective sides and mutual distaste for another Armageddon.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Many of the deaths. Ligur dying by being melted into molten goo? Scary. Hastur screaming like a little girl? Hilarious.
  • Crowley scaring his plants into submission can be a little frightening, but his over-the-top voice and the fact that the plants are literally shaking pulls it back around to funny.
• Ending Fatigue: The plot of The End of the World as We Know It is resolved in twenty-five minutes of the last episode with the other twenty-five wrapping up the character arcs with little dramatic stakes remaining. A bit fitting, since the whole show has really had the apocalypse as an almost secondary plot to developing Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship as well as the world around them – if you took Crowley and Aziraphale out of the story entirely, absolutely nothing about the apocalypse plot would change, since the babies still would have gotten mixed up (Crowley doesn't say "Room 3" in the books and Sister Mary does it all on her own), and everything that happens after that doesn't involve them in any plot-changing way.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Warlock Dowling, despite his bratty attitude and limited screentime, is fairly popular among fans due to Crowley and Aziraphale raising him for eleven years, his portrayal as a young child, and his parents' more dysfunctional portrayal giving a Freudian Excuse for his bad behavior.
  • Muriel, the Endearingly Dorky angel from Season 2, is well-loved for being completely adorable, with their Muppet-like appearance and cheerful innocence, and their love of Earth and books. Many fans portray them as Crowley and Aziraphale's surrogate kid, and jokingly call them a "child of divorce" after the ending of Season 2.
  • Gabriel is a secondary player in the first season, but Jon Hamm plays the guy as such a glorious douchebag that fans absolutely loved it, which led to him becoming a central character of Season 2 and getting a lot of Character Development.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • A theory that Crowley was the Archangel Raphael pre-Fall is relatively popular in fanworks.
  • There's an entire spoiler-heavy essay that postulates that Metatron has been rewriting the Book of Life to manipulate the second season so Aziraphale becomes the new Supreme Archangel.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: Two of them concerning Raphael, the fourth Christian archangel who doesn't appear despite Gabriel, Michael, & Uriel being in the show. Fics will explore either Crowley being Raphael before he fell or Aziraphale & Crowley combined being Raphael (and being split into two separate beings with the evil part 'cast out' before the events of the show). The mostly accepted Fanon is that Crowley was Raphael, but Falling meant that he wasn't allowed to retain his God-given name and status.
  • There's also an interesting one that suggests that Aziraphale is an assumed name like Crowley, and that his original name was Aziraphael (with an emphasis on the 'el' at the end, like Raphael), changed for whatever reason like Crowley did from Crawley.
    • 'Azir' is an ancient Arabic word for 'rent charged on a field after crops have been harvested' a.k. 'leftovers' or 'remnants'. Aziraphael would therefore be 'the remnants of Raphael'
  • Previously, fans were hesitant to try writing a roleswap AU because of how difficult it'd be to keep them in character without a complete Deconstruction (see The Sacred and the Profane). With the TV series, though, fans have gotten braver about trying the plot out. They've also engaged in variants such as Crowley rising back to Heaven after his actions in the series, or Aziraphale falling due to his association with Crowley (at least once out of spite that he was forced to choose between Heaven and Crowley).
  • Since the show has aired, there's been a number of fics posted revolving around the plot of Crowley and Aziraphale adopting and raising Adam, basically becoming his dads (Archive of Our Own even has a tag for it). A few of them end with Adam proclaiming them to be his real fathers when he rejects Satan.
    • It's also common to have Warlock be semi-adopted by Aziraphale and Crowley as well, since they did look after him for 11 years.
  • Since it isn't shown how exactly Aziraphale and Crowley figured out from Agnes' prophecy that they needed to switch bodies to avoid being killed by Heaven and Hell, a number of fics cover that in greater detail and usually include a Relationship Upgrade for them too.
  • Heaven and Hell trying out other methods of punishment for Aziraphale and Crowley, usually by making them human or erasing their memories of each other.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With The Good Place, due to both shows being quirky dark comedies that focus on the nature of Heaven and Hell, and the way angels and demons interact with humanity. Neil Gaiman has even said he thinks Crowley would like the show. As a bonus, Crowley has more than a little in common with The Good Place's Michael. The two shows also happen to share a castmember as Michael McKean, who plays Shadwell, appeared in an episode of The Good Place.
  • Similarly with Lucifer (2016). Not only do both shows focus on Heaven and Hell and the life of demons and angels on Earth, but both also have ties to Neil Gaiman as a creator. Numerous crossovers between the two popped up after the Good Omens series dropped.
  • With Elisabeth, as both have The Grim Reaper as a character ^note Death in Elisabeth also have attendant angels, and may be Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous depending on the casting, emphasizes the importance of free will, and contain dark humor.
  • At least in social media, the show's fandom shares a following with the Doctor Who fandom, due to Crowley being played by David Tennant. It also helps that both Neil Gaiman and Michael Sheen have had involvement with Doctor Who before.
    • Notably in Japan, Good Omens has been credited for a significant spike of interest towards the Doctor Who revival due to the popularity of Crowley and David Tennant, which led a sizable number of fans into watching the latter for David Tennant.
  • Has a significant shared fandom with Supernatural, as the latter is also heavily based around Judeo-Christian mythology and has a number of overlapping characters and concepts, such as an extremely similar Antichrist figure and a prominent demon literally being named Crowley. Eric Kripke, the creator of Supernatural, has explicitly stated that his series was inspired by the original novel.
  • Also with Our Flag Means Death, both series being queer-friendly quirky comedies about the value of overturning your supposed destiny for a Chosen Family relationship. They even got their own hashtag, "#PirateOmens."
  • Has a lot of overlap with What We Do in the Shadows (2019), to the point of people calling Good Omens, Our Flag Means Death and What We Do in the Shadows "the new Superwholock". For better or worse.
• He Really Can Act: While both David Tennant and Michael Sheen have fairly illustrious careers, when Aziraphale and Crowley switch bodies, they really get to show off how well they can play the other. Special mention to the scene after the attempted executions where they're on the park bench, complete with Tennant sitting as prim and proper as Aziraphale would while Sheen sprawls out and slouches as befitting Crowley. Their accents and voices are both spot-on as well.
• Harsher in Hindsight: This series came out in the summer of 2019, when the idea of a worldwide plague bringing humanity to its knees was silly in these modern times, and thus Pestilence had retired and Pollution had replaced it. Then Pestilence decided to come back for one last gig...
  • Far more prophetic, though no less harsh for it - when the Russian submariners hear that their nukes have been hijacked and they are now at war, their first thought is "with Ukraine?"
  • Arthur Young and Crowley meet once again a year later under much darker circumstances in the 2020 series Des, about one of the most infamous serial-killers in British history, Dennis Nilson.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A Scottish man being an only-slightly-evil demon named Crowley who's mainly out for himself. Why does that sound familiar?
  • David Tennant finally gets to be ginger. And the Doctor is back in the Globe Theatre!
  • Adam as the full Antichrist bears an unavoidable resemblance to Brandon from Brightburn, released around the same time.
  • All of the Holmes siblings show up in Good Omens. In Sherlock, Mark Gatiss (Mycroft) and Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) play people on the good side, while Siân Brooke (Eurus) plays a villain. The reverse is true here, with them playing a Nazi, Satan himself, and Deirdre Young, respectively.
  • A rather misguided open-letter written by angry conservative Christians asking Netflix^note It's actually on Amazon Prime to cancel the show included the fact that God was played by a woman included in their list of grievances. Where were these people when Octavia Spencer played God in the faith-based drama The Shack? Even the novel on which The Shack was based (which was written by an actual Christian for Christian readers) insists that God appeared in the form of a magical black woman.
    • Additionally, all the mockery the letter got for demanding the cancellation of a limited series has become this since the show eventually got a second season.
• Hollywood Homely: Both Newt and Anathema are played by very attractive actors. The show thus has them dress in odd ways, and gives Newt glasses and a messy haircut (both of which are noted as the being his worst features in the book). Anathema is also given glasses, spends most of the series in ruffled dresses which wouldn't look out of place in the Victorian era, and pins her hair into an odd type of updo which vaguely resembles a stereotypical pointed witches hat.
• Ho Yay:
  • Hastur is utterly horrified when Ligur is killed by holy water, but is perfectly willing to use holy water on other demons himself, implying it was the loss of Ligur specifically which upset him so. The book also specifies that, in their appearance in the opening scene, they're sharing one cigarette, despite the fact that both of them can conjure up infinite cigarettes, and don't even need to smoke since they don't breathe and presumably can't get biologically addicted to anything.
  • It seems like there might be something more between Morag and Elsbeth in the "Resurrectionist" minisode. After Morag dies, the other one is ready to take her own life to be with her.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming:
  • Carrying over from the book fandom, Crowley/Aziraphale is Ineffable Husbands. Most other ships follow this trend.
  • Gabriel/Beelzebub is Ineffable Bureaucracy.
  • Maggie/Nina is sometimes called Ineffable Wives.
  • Muriel/Eric the Disposable Demon is Ineffable Juniors or Ineffable Interns.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The series has quite a few complaints about being overly faithful to the novel, including the parts that don't translate well to the new medium (in particular, the narration from God often just seems to be condescendingly spelling out things we can see perfectly well). Neil Gaiman has acknowledged this, saying he felt very uneasy about making significant changes as it would feel disrespectful to his late friend and writing partner Terry Pratchett. There are also some fans who feel that God's take on the narration is actually better than it reads in the opening chapters of the book.
• Jerkass Woobie: Shadwell is rude and abrasive to everyone and at least in theory wants to burn witches alive (he never has, but only because he's never managed to find one). However, he's obviously a sad old man who's devoted his life to a pointless cause, and no one seems to take him seriously enough to be offended by him.
• LGBT Fan Base: The series is interpreted as gaycoded, and the actors have said they were intentionally playing up the love between the two main characters. Upon its release Vulture ran a headline declaring it to be a Gay Love Story. While per Word of God and book canon angels don’t really use human labels regarding gender, this attracted a lot of transgender and nonbinary fans into the fold as well. As of Season 2, Crowley is openly in love with Aziraphale, and the show acknowledges and celebrates both lesbian and nonbinary identities.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • God ships Ineffable Husbands!^Explanation Due to God being, of course, all-knowing, and not seeming to mind Crowley and Aziraphale's friendship, many fans have joked that She's obviously a Shipper on Deck.
  • Can I hear a wahoo?^Explanation Screencaps of Crowley saying this while presenting his plan for the M25 to Hell have become popular reaction images, often replacing the M25 with something the poster likes.
  • "What was it he said that got everyone so upset?" "Be kind to each other." "Oh yeah, that'll do it."^Explanation Said by Aziraphale and Crowley while witnessing Jesus' crucifixon. Used a lot for conversations where people seem to get mad at others for asking them to not be assholes
  • Five Fennec Foxes in an Overcoat^Explanation Neil Gaiman jokingly claimed that budget cuts for the second season meant David Tennant would be replaced with five trained fennec foxes in a Totem Pole Trench. Fans quickly latched onto the idea, producing fan art showing the foxes in Crowley's place and reacting to updates about production by acting as if the foxes really had been cast.
  • EVERY^Explanation On June 12, 2023, about a month before the second season's premiere, Prime Video's official Twitter account posted a Pride Month video that spoiled a kiss between Aziraphale and Crowley. The frame had a text overlay of the word "EVERY" (as part of the video's message) and was quickly replicated over frames from other shows. The video was reportedly up for 3 days until somebody noticed. This fiasco led to the show trending on Twitter and Tumblr, as well as a message from Neil Gaiman asking fans to stop spreading the spoiler.
  • 🎶Every day, it’s a-gettin’ closer, taking a bath with a fucking toaster🎶^Explanation A TikTok user recorded a short gallows-humored parody of the song “Everyday” by Buddy Holly. The original Holly song subsequently played a large plot role in the Good Omens second season. After the emotionally intense season 2 finale in July 2023, fans used the parody song to create jokingly suicidal Tik Tok videos to express how the fans and Crowley were devastated by the season’s ending.
  • We have hundreds Aziraphale and Crowley slashfics thanks to 9/11 ^Explanation  After Good Omens became a smash success and generated intense fan devotion some people have noted that you can trace Michael Sheen being cast in this series to his performance in the Twilight films giving him a bigger spotlight, which caused some who knew about the history of Twilight's writing to note that you can further connect it to 9/11 because because the tone of the books were partly inspired by My Chemical Romance, who came together due to anger of the US Governments actions post-9/11. This would eventually spread amongst Good Omens fans who found the chain of events leading to their favourite ship hilarious.
• Moe: Job's daughter Jemminah melts many hearts with her Cheerful Child moments around Crowley and fascination with blue geckos.
• Money-Making Shot: Satan's appearance in the last episode. It's by far the most complex visual effect in the show, and is featured in the trailers, but adds nothing to the story, since Satan is fended off in the same way as in the book, where he never quite manages to appear because in both cases, Adam changes reality to make Mr. Young his real father.
• Narm:
  • Adam's scream when he realises he's driven away his friends is less an anguished cry of despair and more of a mechanical, monotonous drone. It almost sounds like he's trying to be sarcastic about it.
  • Some viewers think that horrific monsters are usually better left unseen, since the human mind will automatically fill-in with what scares a particular viewer, and so to see Satan come out of the ground with an oddly flat and small face left a lot to be desired once you actually got a look at him. Even just omitting his face would have fit with his reputation and made him a whole lot more magnificent and intimidating.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The Devil himself appears in the final episode, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. He’s also very clearly where the majority of the show’s special effects budget went.
  • Sir Derek Jacobi makes a brief appearances as Metatron, the Voice of God. Though the season two finale seems to be setting him up for a larger role.
• One True Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley, aka Ineffable Husbands, is the ship of the fandom. Other ships do exist, but only receive a fraction of the attention and love. This was true for the book fandom, but it multiplied tenfold when the series aired.
• Retroactive Recognition: Rufus Drumknott is one of the Nazis in the church, Chuck has become a Witchfinder General, The Captain is the accountant who Crowley scares the utter bejeezus out of after he accidentally shoots Aziraphale with a paintball, Lucy is the Lord of the Files, Raymond Chestnut used to be one of the Four Horsemen while Lord Boreal went by the name Lord Ligur, Jules Reyes left the PPC and became a witch... Really, the series is full of retroactive recognition.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: As of the first two seasons, Muriel and Eric (the recurring demon who gets killed multiple times) have not met. This hasn't stopped a small following for the pairing from manifesting.
• Special Effects Failure: The show is gorgeous as far as the costumes and practical effects are concerned; the digital effects are... a mixed bag. This becomes painfully evident in S1:E4: when Adam tells the other kids to "Stop talking!", their mouths get "sealed" with what's obviously a digital cancellation that doesn't even follow the movements of the actors' faces.
• Squick: The undisguised forms of the demons. Pustules, sores, and nasty-looking symbiotic animals (like the frog squatting on Hastur's head) are evidently popular.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Newt/Anathema falls flat for a number of people since the entire reason they get together in the first place is Agnes Nutter's prophecies and there's very little development for them otherwise.
  • Likewise, Shadwell/Tracy hasn't sat particularly well, given that much of their interactions prior to the last episode or two are him yelling at and insulting her for being a sex worker. However, it is clear that his calling her those things has gone from insulting to a kind of Slap-Slap-Kiss on his part, as he is clearly attracted to her, and she has taken his "Witchfinder" personality as just a quirk, which, to be honest, is all it is.
  • Invoked and then defied in the case of Maggie/Nina: Aziraphale and Crowley try very hard to set them up almost out of the blue^note Maggie has an unrequited crush for Nina, but that's about it, she's only ever talked to Nina once that day to cover up an unrelated miracle they made; but Maggie and Nina catch wind quite soon, and once the whole truth comes to light, they state fair and square that they're not ready to date yet, especially Nina, who's just had a bad break up. They'd rather take things slow and get to know one another.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Four Horsemen, they get a lot of characterisation, and quite a big deal is made of them, but they don't actually really do anything. Granted, they probably would have done more if Adam had taken up his role as the Antichrist, but other than that, they get an Establishing Character Moment, ride to the air base, have a Evil Gloating moment each, then go down without a real fight.
  • Admittedly, this is exactly what happens in the book as well. The anti-climax is part of the point.
  • Actually felt by some people in a different way: A part of the audience felt that the Four Horsepersons were much less threatening in the show than in the book, mostly due to their introduction scenes being removed - as such we never see Famine making people die of anorexia or Pollution actually causing industrial disasters (the scenes were actually shot and are in the scriptbook, but they were deleted due to either being too upsetting or the test-audience not receiving them well).
• Ugly Cute: The little slug demon that announces the start of a Kangaroo Trial in Hell looks like a pudgy little ball, or perhaps a child's toy.

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