And I do mean turgid. No amount of CGI, stunt casting, or provocative anti-theology can redeem this overwrought, overstretched, puerile waste of everyone's time. At first, Good Omens appeared to be an antidote to the forced life-affirmation of The Good Place. No, no. It sets its sights so much higher. It's a would-be world-history epic that has so many unrelated threads that there apparently needs to be exposition every ten minutes. It ends up a mediocre children's adventure series.

The whole story could be cut to one 30-minute episode. The novelty of seeing successively more recently-popular actors chewing the green screen wears off long before Benedict Cumberbatch does his turn as (ho, ho) Satan. The novelty of seeing child actors interacting with overblown CGI wore off in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets. There are gags that are done to death several times over.

Technical note: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are War, Conquest, Pestilence and Death, not War, Famine, Pollution and Death. Gaiman/Pratchett couldn't even get that right. Patronizing the audience's grasp of English, I don't doubt.

I don't hate this because of the Satanist themes. I hate it because it's incredibly, deeply, crashingly boring and nobody thought to tell Douglas Mackinnon.