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27 July 2023

Terry Pratchett would love the queer politics of Good Omens 2

David Tennant’s devil and Michael Sheen’s angel are one of television’s great odd couple romances.

By Marc Burrows

Good Omens 2, the second season of Prime Video’s cult hit, will finally arrive on Friday (28 July), almost five years after the first season debuted and over three decades since the publication of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s beloved novel on which it was based. Like the first season, Good Omens 2 is warm, inviting, weird, whip-smart, wonderfully diverse, very funny… and it’s really going to annoy the “anti-woke” brigade.

As with Gaiman’s other recent TV hit, The Sandman, this is a show with diversity and representation built into its DNA. Characters have same-sex crushes and no one bats an eyelid. There’s a completely open approach to casting in which the race, gender and physical characteristics of individuals basically don’t factor into the story in any way. There are characters with visible disabilities, black characters, white characters, old and young, women, men and non-binary – and none of these identities has any bearing on the story. Rarely is representation on this scale so elegantly done. For a story about the end of the world, it’s strangely utopian.

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