Good Omens Season 2 Review: Aziraphale and Crowley Could Do Anything and We'd Still Watch It

A second season of Good Omens was anything but a sure thing. It's not that the series, which premiered on Prime Video in 2019, wasn't widely liked. But the six-episode miniseries thoroughly adapted Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 1990 novel about an angel and a demon's attempt to avert the apocalypse. Gaiman had been cautious about adapting it in the first place after Pratchett's death, an attitude that seemed likely to extend to any sequel (even though the co-authors had tossed around ideas for continuing the story). And once you save the world from Armageddon, where could the story even go?

Billed in the credits as Good Omens 2, this second season doesn't waste time supplying an answer: go smaller. A supernatural threat looms over the season, but it's a cozier, more localized sort of potential cataclysm, one largely clustered around one London city block. Having been convicted of treason by their respective bosses in Heaven and Hell, longtime friends (as in millennia) the retired angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and the retired demon Crowley (David Tennant) have settled in nicely to life on Earth. Aziraphale tends to business at his antique bookshop while Crowley mostly lives a life of leisure. Or tries to: When a demon named Shax (Miranda Richardson, one of several first-season cast members playing a new role in Season 2) visits him with the vague word that "something's up" in Heaven, he senses his restfulness might be at an end.

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That instinct is essentially proven correct when the archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm) turns up at Aziraphale's shop. Only he doesn't know he's Gabriel. He also doesn't know why he's fully nude. Once a fearsome opponent, Gabriel's now a walking blank slate of a being who takes the name Jim and finds every new experience and earthly phenomenon — from hot chocolate to gravity — to be utterly fascinating. Meanwhile, elsewhere on Aziraphale's block, a lovestruck record store owner named Maggie (Maggie Service) attempts to court Nina (Nina Sosanya), the prickly but intriguing owner of the Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death cafe. This might seem unrelated, but will turn out to be of cosmic significance.

Eventually. Without having to deal with the Antichrist or the Four Horsemen and the mounting sense that the world was falling apart of the first season, Good Omens 2 is content to take a more leisurely pace and occasionally meander through time. Three of the six episodes contain what are billed as "minisodes," essentially extended flashbacks with separate writing credits that check in with Aziraphale and Crowley at different points in their history together — one during the events of the Book of Job, a second in Victorian Scotland, and a third during the Blitz. But despite the separate billing, they're integrated seamlessly into the surrounding episode, and the season's overarching story.

7.6

Good Omens Season 2

at Prime Video

Like

• Smaller scale highlights the great relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley
• "Minisodes" work well with the story
• Jon Hamm the comedy ham

Dislike

• Short season

The season is otherwise co-written by Gaiman and British comedy veteran John Finnemore and directed, like the first season, by Douglas Mackinnon. All involved seem to understand that all the supernatural absurdity needs to serve the show's key element: the ridiculously fun pairing of Sheen and Tennant. If anything, this second season increases the contrast between the odd couple. Tennant plays Crowley as a rock star louche who does his best to hide his softer instincts. (There's a reason he's not serving Hell anymore, after all, even if he doesn't want everyone to know it.) Sheen's Aziraphale practically glows with benevolence and seems fussier than ever, but there's a skeptical side to him that explains why he's pals with someone who ought to be his enemy. Heaven doesn't have room for those who ask too many questions.

The supporting cast is, as before, fun, though both Service and Sosanya, whose character is stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship with a partner who still remains unseen at the end of the fifth episode, both bring considerable pathos to their work. Quelin Sepulveda is a fun addition as Muriel, an inexperienced angel whose attempts to go undercover as a police officer don't get very far. (The all-white uniform and the assumed name "Inspector Constable" don't help.) 

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But it's Hamm who steals every scene he's in. A gifted dramatic actor — as Mad Men proved again and again — he seems to revel every chance he gets to play a clown. His Gabriel… er Jim, provides many opportunities as a complete innocent who does whatever he's told and takes tremendous pleasure in being able to make silly faces. As with the unfortunately underseen delight Confess Fletch, his work here confirms him as a gifted comic actor stuck in the body of a leading man.

Whether or not there will be a third season remains an open question. (And there's at least a chance the world ends in the finale, which was not supplied to critics.) But, even if Good Omens 2 doesn't suggest any reason the story has to be continued, this second outing proves that it probably should. They might come from opposite planes of existence, but Aziraphale and Crowley are good company, whether or not they're fending off other threats both divine and infernal or just killing time and trading banter in the little corner of the world they now call home. 

Premieres: Friday, July 28 (all six episodes)
Who's in it: Michael Sheen, David Tennant, Jon Hamm, Miranda Richardson
Who's behind it: Neil Gaiman and John Finnemore
For fans of: Absurd, cosmic tales and buddy comedies
How many episodes we watched: 5 of 6