“He’d been an angel once. He hadn’t meant to Fall. He’d just hung around with the wrong people.”

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Combining Terry Pratchetts dry humour and Neil Gaimans dark, yet welcoming imagery, Good Omens is about an Angel and a Demon who are not keen on the coming Apocalypse.

The reason I’m excited is not simply because one of my favorite books is coming to television (well, tv if you get BBC Two, Amazon Prime for the rest of us), but because Neil Gaiman is the show-runner, executive producer and writer for the series.

So, this isn’t the case of Hollywood buying the rights to something just so that they could use the name to attract people, and then do whatever they wanted to with the story and characters. With one of the original authors intimately involved in the production, you know it’s going to be a fairly faithful adaptation of the written work.

That’s not always a good thing. The Stephen King written TV mini-series version of The Shinning is a good example of how trying to put everything in a book onto a screen doesn’t always work. Neil Gaiman however was heavily involved in the first season of American Gods and it turned out to be freaking amazing!

Another plus. David Tennant plays Crowley and while I’m re-reading the book now, I can completely hear his voice when I read Crowleys lines. It’s almost like the part was written for him (It wasn’t. Tennant was still a relative unknown when the book was published in 1990)

If you don’t have Amazon Prime (or live in the UK), I highly recommend the book. I have yet to meet a person who read it but didn’t like it and it is one of only two books my wife and I both love (American Gods being the other, so it tells you how good Neil Gaiman is as a writer.)

It may sound odd, but combining Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimans writing makes for a work with a very Douglas Adams feel to it.