It takes two half miracles to hide an Archangel, but three to do a foreword (and surprise bonus afterword): thanks to you all smashing the £2m stretch goal on the Good Omens graphic novel Kickstarter, we're delighted to add the ineffable *trio* of Michael Sheen, David Tennant & Jon Hamm.
Me seeing all the posts about the kickstarter knowing damn well I can’t get one
Hello Mr. Gaiman! I and a few others were curious as to what this mysterious pallet 9 box 96 held. And now that we have S2, may we know what's inside?
Also, thank you so much for season 2. It broke my heart, but I love it so so much
I have absolutely no idea what's in which pallet or box. I'm sorry. The truth had to come out one day.
Bigger heartbreak than episode six 😭😭
So were you cackling like a wizard casting curses when you wrote the last part of episode 6 or is that just subtext?
No, I was really sad for them.
You guys forget that he loves them. Most writers, the good ones anyways, tend to feel like there’s little bits of themselves in their characters. He’s not writing it like this to torment us (although it does feel that way sometimes), he’s writing it to tell the story, no matter how sad it is for now. He wouldn’t give them a good story if he didn’t care about them. Can’t wait for season 3 ❤️
look at you, you're gorgeous!
WOAAAAAH
I'm sorry Neil, although I love your writing and agree with your opinions on most subjects I have to disagree with you on the writers' strike. No-one should have a more privileged life as a result of being clever and creative. I worked from the age of 15 to the age of 65 in low-paid jobs, taking 1 year off to go to drama school and 3 years off to get a fine art degree. I worked in terrible but necessary jobs, labouring, stacking boxes, unloading trucks, running errands, filing, going to work on a bicycle at all hours of the day and night on shift work in all kinds of weather. Even when I was a student I was still working in part-time cleani8ng jobs and even during periods of unemployment I worked in volunteer jobs for charities and social services.
According to Mensa I have an IQ of 160 and according to Plymouth University I have a BA hons in Fine Art but I cannot accept the idea that writers and other creative people should avoid normal jobs like driving an "Uber" or working in an office/shop/factory/construction site. To accept that idea would be to create a new aristocratic class when we should abolishing the old princes and aristocrats.
What we need, I feel sure, is a redistribution of labour so that everybody who can do so would spend some time each year in blue collar work and everybody who can would get higher education and a chance to make art of one sort or another.
The idea of doing other jobs to supplement writing or drawing shouldn't be seen as a terrible thing, a punishment or a suffering. Sharing the jobs around should be seen as normal.
I mean, I've done my half century of sweat labour and it didn't hurt me too much. I'm retired now and still making art of various kinds and I've never asked anyone to pay me for any art piece I've made. making art, writing, drawing etc. is the fun stuff which we get to do in exchange for the blue collar stuff which puts food on the table.
The worst pop song ever written was Sting/Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" which ridicules the working class from a position of educational privilege.
So what's my question? My question is: What's wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet? Sounds perfectly fine to me.
Nothing's wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet. Writers and artists have been doing that since the dawn of time. Actors too.
But by the same token, there's nothing right about assuming that writing isn't a blue-collar job, or that writers and other people who make art can only make it for love and that thus they need other jobs to subsidise their craft.
I like living in a world in which the people who make the things that make the world worth living in get paid for their work. For me, that includes the people who make films and TV, books, art and music and comics.
Having spent a lot of time on film and TV sets, it's a blue-collar world on set, and everyone is working long and hard to make the shows you love. I'm never going to suggest that the riggers or the gaffers or the make-up team or the focus-pullers should drive ubers in order to have the privilege of being on the set and working there.
Or to put it another way, from the most blue-collar writer I ever knew...
The issue about the strike isn't about having a more privileged life than blue-collar people. It's about having sort of, please gods, as privileged a life as blue-collar people... while doing both that work (to support ourselves) and another kind of work from which those who do it never get a day off, from the moment we start it until the day we die.
Not one.
Because Story will wake you up for attention on your days off, on your weekends, on your holidays (as if 95% of writers ever have any!). And as for the waking hours, they're already toast. Story will interrupt you over your coffee while you're hardly even conscious, in the middle of your normal day's paperwork, at lunch (if you can afford or are allowed time for any), in the throes of orgasm with your spouse. It will haunt you while you're changing out people's catheter bags, and come up to surprise you in the middle of an average workday (per a discussion about the Battle of Salamis that I had with a specialist while resecting someone's colon). It will leave you in tears, once again, while wrapping yet another patient's dead body.
Plainly the side of the arts in which you've been working isn't Story. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If you haven't been paying attention to the increasing levels of crap that US-based writers (and, also, others elsewhere) have been dealing with... you need to seek out some education at best speed.
Most of us are lower-paid and (to judge by our income) lower- or middle-class. For the last half-century or so, thousands of writers whose labors you've enjoyed have worked in a storytelling ecology that's supported the vast majority of independent/freelance screen storytellers in making a modest or supplemental living. (For example: my only Star Trek: The Next Generation script earned me about $14,000 [my split of $28K with my co-writer]. After that, low-and-dwindling yearly residuals in the low 4 figures continued for some years after. That's long done, now... but it bought a lot of groceries and cat food while it lasted, while I was also working other jobs.)
That ecology, though, has steadily had the blood sucked out of it with the shift to streaming—when the streamers told us, at the last Guild negotiations, "Nobody knows if this'll work. We'll make it up to you later if it does...!").
...Guess what? It worked. And now they don't want to make it up to us. (And somehow it's hard to be surprised.)
The old writer-payment ecology, as a result, is gone. It's not as if our stories are worth less than they were. (Indeed, evidence suggests far otherwise.) It's not as if the Earth's orbit's changed, or something's occurred that's had nothing to do with human actions. It's because rich people at the top of rich studios and streaming companies have decided they've got better use for the companies' billions of [insert favorite currency, it doesn't matter which one] than fairly paying their writers.
Some of us actually remember how things were before a workable system was broken, and can compare them to how they are now... bearing in mind what we were promised. As a result, better-known storytellers like Neil (and others: it's too late in the evening for me to do your homework for you...) are on strike now to assist those of us who're not so well known. People like me, for whom $14,000, spread over a whole year (or two, or three, or five...) made a big difference in our lives... not like the few hundred dollars now being offered to writers who've done a whole lot more work over a far shorter term.
In the larger sense: it'd be just lovely if the world were so arranged that all of us who prefer to mostly do creative work—because it's what we know best, and do best—were easily able to share (perceived) middle-class labor time around with those who don't do it (like something out of Le Guin's The Dispossessed). …Though most of us have also been doing second or third jobs as well. I don't know any writer who's grudged that if it meant also being able to do the work we love best.
It'd also be lovely if those whose privilege (as per your description) allows them access to higher education could understand the challenges of those whose situation didn't allow them anything of the kind. For example: I was lucky enough to pull down a Science and Nursing scholarship at the end of high school... otherwise my lower-middle-class family's finances couldn't have afforded me any other higher education at all. I happily worked to support myself all during my nursing training, and special-duty nursing kept me alive until my first few novels sold and made enough to kept me afloat.
That was just fine...for me. But I don't see why writers more talented than I (and who can tell who they are?), who've got more than I have to give to the world, should have to work two or three jobs to support their writing.
And I don't see why, having lived through the multiple-job bullshit, your vision should supersede other, less onerous ones. I mean, I’m sorry for the stuff you went through… but don’t see any reason why others should need to go through the same. (“I suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn…” is so 1970s.)
Anyway. For the time being, everyday working writers are fighting that corner right now, the only way we can: by withdrawing our middle-class [by definition of middle-or-low-five-figure-USD$] labor from the people making themselves rich off it. And isn't it funny that the people from whom we've withdrawn it are so desperately trying—via AI, etc.—to find a way to do without our labor entirely? (As if what would pass for daily donut money for most series is somehow too expensive...?) It kinda indicates that (color-of-collar) class isn't at all the issue here.
Understandable, then, that you might be glad you're retired... and not down in the trenches with the rest of us. Those of us still working hard to survive (including me, still writing at 71 despite theoretical "retirement ages"—impossible for us to consider in this "new world" economy…) hope to survive long enough, if we're as lucky as you, to eventually, have something similar.
Meanwhile, those of us who weave stories for the entertainment of those around us would just like to make enough from this work to buy groceries and pay our electric bills and feed our spouses (for those of us who have spouses), or kids (those of us who have kids). ...Or cats. (etc) You know: the kind of things that ordinary blue-collar people have.
And for their sake: just as the writers before us (in the 1960s) fought for the right to the then-revolutionary concept of residuals, we fight. Not just for ourselves, but for the writers to come after us, who also have spouses and kids*... and tales worth telling.
*And cats.
Why did you make Aziraphale power-hungry? He even controlled people… doesn’t seem like him
I don't think of Aziraphale as power-hungry at all.
If y’all are thinking of my man-shaped being as “power hungry” I don’t think you watched the right show.
hey neil!!
the historical flashbacks are some of my favorite scenes in season 1 and season 2 of good omens, so i was wondering if there were any time periods you’d really like to portray aziraphale and crowley in that you haven’t already???
Quite a few. Ones that we had planned as possible for Season 2 (that either didn't get written or didn't get filmed) included a Wild West one, a 15th century Papal one, an Arabian Nights one, and a 1960s American one with Crowley and Aziraphale female presenting. And we have the whole of human history as a canvas. But for now the ones you've got are all.
WILD WEST AND 1960’s IS A NEED RIGHT NOW. SEASON THREE PLEAAAASE 😭😭
Hi! I hope you’re having a good day :>
My questioning question for the purpose of asking:
In the subtitles (season 2, Episode 4 if i remember right? The part like right before Shax interrogates him), Aziraphale calls the bentley Lesli. Is this like a name or nickname it has? Or maybe it was an error in the subtitling?
If you do get to this one, thank you in advance for your time! :D
He says “Let’s see”. The subtitle people were very imaginative and didn’t ever go and look at the scripts.
The subtitle people making the biggest effort to put exactly what WASN’T being said in the CC.
Ineffably amusing indeed! Cheers to Good Omens Season 2 debuting as the #1 Comedy on Prime Video! @neil-gaiman
Season three. now.
hello mr gaiman. i’ve just finished watching good omens 2 (i’ve already watched it by myself) with my mom (who is very homophobic), and throughout my entire viewing i was VERY nervous on what her reaction to the kiss between aziraphale and crowley would be.
when we got to that scene, where aziraphale tells crowley about the offer from the metatron and whatnot, i was shaking a lot and trying to not show it, because i was so unbelievably nervous.
during that scene, i could see that my mom had started crying a little bit, tearing up, and whatnot. i think she was trying to hide it, but she’s my mother, and i can read her well, even if i don’t like to admit it.
when they kissed, i looked at my mom and saw she had a slight scowl on her face, but she still looked sad. absolutely heartbroken, which i was not expecting at all. i was expecting her to scoff, complain, go on a rant about how everything is gay nowadays, but no. she was just sad. and it shocked me, because my mother is— well, she’s my mother, and she’s complicated.
something that also surprised me, while watching, is that she didn’t complain at all about maggie and nina, or the few comments characters made referring to aziraphale and crowley as a romantic couple.
the first thing she said to me when the credits started rolling was, “is there going to be a season 3?” not anything about aziraphale and crowley, no complaints, nothing. just asking if there’s going to be a season 3. and i was absolutely shocked, because i had gotten myself all worked up about how she’d react to the ending of season 2.
so, in conclusion, thanks for potentially curing my mom’s long-lasting homophobia with good omens season 2. it was a lovely season, and i cannot wait for the potential season 3. thank you so much for normalizing queer characters in media, it really means the world to me and many other queer people around the world.
I'm so glad she was sad.
Neil Gaiman and the Good Omens team single-handedly cure homophobia!!?
"It's gotten to the point where I think a lot of people can't believe it if they get a residual for $25," O'Brien said. "They're so used to opening those envelopes and it's 30 cents."
O'Brien, who has appeared on dozens of shows, from "Grey's Anatomy" to "Pretty Little Liars," shared images of residual checks from more than two decades ago worth $47.49, $87.77 and $216.25. Others, from the past few years, amounted to $1.63, 43 cents and 1 cent.
Hi Neil!
My question concerns the angels' clothing. in the first episode we see Crowley and Aziraphale in the same clothes, then we see Gabriel and Michael in different clothes from Crowley and Aziraphale. so, do only archangels have different clothes, or do all ranks of angels have different clothes?
I'm not sure that I understand the question.
I think they were saying how in the first scene Crowley and Aziraphale were wearing similar outfits, but the archangels clothing all look different from each other. They might’ve been asking if lower ranking angels have to have a sort of uniform depending on their rank, or if they have more freedom with that?
The clothing that the angels wear changes over time. Aziraphale's angel clothes (and Michael's and Gabriel's and Muriel's) are different in episode 2 to contemporary times.
Hi Neil!
My question concerns the angels' clothing. in the first episode we see Crowley and Aziraphale in the same clothes, then we see Gabriel and Michael in different clothes from Crowley and Aziraphale. so, do only archangels have different clothes, or do all ranks of angels have different clothes?
I'm not sure that I understand the question.
I think they were saying how in the first scene Crowley and Aziraphale were wearing similar outfits, but the archangels clothing all look different from each other. They might’ve been asking if lower ranking angels have to have a sort of uniform depending on their rank, or if they have more freedom with that?
everything everywhere all at once (2022) // good omens 2 (2023)
STOPP
Crowley's hearing "I can finally make you good enough to deserve Heaven"
but Aziraphale's saying "I can finally make Heaven good enough to deserve you"
Hello please stop
Stardew players waiting for the update to come
Me real
