Good Omens’ Aziraphale is a proud bookseller whenever he is not performing miracles, but his demon pal Crowley seems to be slacking off on Earth.
Good Omens is a story that balances truly apocalyptic events that all of Earth, Heaven, and Hell depend on and the day-to-day routine lives of two longtime more-than-friends.
Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale moonlights as a bookseller, but David Tennant’s Crowley is in between jobs. Some Good Omens fans are wondering why Crowley doesn’t have a human cover job and what exactly he does all day when he is not spreading evil and tempting people on Earth. Neil Gaiman, the creator of the show who co-wrote the original 1990 novel with Terry Pratchett, has just revealed on Tumblr why Aziraphale and Crowley seemingly have a one-income household.
Prime Video’s Good Omens is the first live-action adaptation of the novel that has seen the light of day, but it is certainly not the first attempt at one. Back in the 1990s, Gaiman and Pratchett were trying to get a show based on their novel off the ground, sending scripts to studios. Apparently, one production studio wondered the same thing that fans do nowadays, which is why Crowley is unemployed. Gaiman attempted to give the demon a job in his next draft, but he turned out to be rubbish at it. Another thing the studio felt the need to change was Aziraphale’s occupation — they saw the angel doing something “more glamorous.”
“I remember in 1991 one of the notes Terry and I got from the studio on our original script was that Crowley needed a job as well and that Aziraphale needed a more glamorous job than Bookseller. It was the first time I’d ever written a script so I tried giving Crowley a job in the next draft, but he wasn’t really very good at it, and it wasn’t very convincing,” wrote Gaiman in a Tumblr post.
The Good Omens author then remarked that Crowley wasn’t entirely jobless since he had things to do in 1941. In the show, this is the year the demon happened to be around to rescue his favorite angel from the hands of the Nazis. Risking his own life and well-being, Crowley went into the church, made sure that the bomb killed the spies, and saved Aziraphale’s prophecy books by performing a miracle. This scene is widely regarded as the moment Aziraphale realizes his feelings for Crowley.
