With Neil Gaiman running the show (alongside director Douglas Mackinnon), Good Omens proved to be a delightful, devilish (and angelic) surprise, an adaptation of the apocalyptically satirical book that Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote that a long way to capturing the magic of the source material. Yet while the authors had kicked around ideas for a sequel, it's still somewhat unexpected to have Amazon announcing a follow-up TV series featuring the return of Michael Sheen's Aziraphale and David Tennant's Crowley.
It's more surprising given that Gaiman had previously blended some of the sequel ideas into the original six-episode run. But here, he sets up the initial spark for the new season... "As Good Omens continues, we will be back in Soho, and all through time and space, solving a mystery which starts with one of the angels wandering through a Soho street market with no memory of who they might be, on their way to Aziraphale's bookshop.
(Although our story actually begins about five minutes before anyone had got around to saying 'Let there be Light')."
"It's thirty-one years since Good Omens was published, which means it's thirty-two years since Terry Pratchett and I lay in our respective beds in a Seattle hotel room at a World Fantasy Convention, and plotted the sequel," adds Gaiman. "I got to use bits of the sequel in Good Omens – that's where our angels came from. Terry's not here any longer, but when he was, we had talked about what we wanted to do with Good Omens, and where the story went next.
"And now, thanks to BBC Studios and Amazon, I get to take it there. I have enlisted some wonderful collaborators, and John Finnemore has come on board to carry the torch with me." For more from the writer/show-runner, head to his blog.
MacKinnon is also back on board, and sets are now being built in Scotland ready for shooting to begin, which should hopefully mean the new season will land next year.