More than 20,000 Christians have signed a petition demanding Netflix to cancel the Neil Gaiman-penned series Good Omens, based on the 1990 collaborative fantasy novel by Gaiman and the late Sir Terry Pratchett. 

All six episodes of the series were released last month. Unfortunately for the petitioners, however, it’s not on Netflix. It’s on Amazon Prime.

Check out the Good Omens trailer below: – make sure you pause the SCIFI.radio stream using the player control at the upper right before you do.

The petition is the work of a Christian organization calling itself “Return to Order”, and have somehow managed to get all these thousands of people to sign it.

There are problems with the petition, of course, the first being that Good Omens was never intended to be more than a six part miniseries, and now that it’s done, there’s nothing to cancel. There was never going to be a second season of it in the first place. The bigger folly, though, is that it’s not Netflix’s to cancel even if that weren’t true. It’s an Amazon Prime production, and amazingly, not one of the 20,000 signees of the petition noticed all the Amazon Prime labeling on the trailers and advertising for the series.

The petition says that Good Omens is ‘another step to make satanism appear normal, light and acceptable’ and ‘mocks God’s wisdom.’ Their complaints include the fact God is ‘voiced by a woman’, Frances McDormand, that the Antichrist is a ‘normal kid’, and that ‘this type of video makes light of Truth, Error, Good and Evil, and destroys the barriers of horror that society still has for the devil.’

Epic Responses

Netflix has responded to the petition, tongue in cheek:

Amazon Prime apparently was quite amused at the petition, and tweeted this on their official Twitter feed:

Of course Neil Gaiman finds the petition quite droll as well, as he not only retweeted the above, he tweeted this himself:

First Omens

The series tells the story of the demon Crowley (David Tennant) and the archangel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) as they cross boundaries and join forces to prevent the coming of the Antichrist, and the accompanying Apocalypse that will end the world.

Gaiman and Pratchett tried for years to get the book produced for television, but Pratchett did not live to see the final result. He died in 2015 at the age of 66 from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease, an illness to which he referred as “The Embuggerance”.

Gaiman and Pratchett had attempted to bring the novel to the small screen for many years. In 2014, Pratchett wrote Gaiman a letter asking him to return to the project:

“You’re the only other person out there with the same love and understanding and passion for this that I have,” Pratchett’s letter read. “I know how busy you are, but I want to see this before the darkness takes me. Will you do this, please?”

Pratchett had never asked Gaimin for anything in the entire 35 years of their friendship, and now he had asked for this – and then Pratchett died, and a favor had become a dying wish. Gaimin set aside his novels for 18 months to work on the TV series.

Miraculously, God has already granted the petitioners prayers. She put the show on Amazon Prime instead.

Brilliant.

Good Omens is available to stream on Amazon Prime now.

Update: They’ve Acknowledged They Got the Wrong Streaming Service. There’s Still One Problem.

The Christian organization Return to Order has updated their petition, acknowledging that they got the wrong streaming service.

“Due to an oversight by Return to Order staff, this petition originally listed Netflix as responsible for the offensive series Good Omens. Amazon Video released the series on May 31. We regret the mistake, and the protests will be delivered to Amazon when the campaign is complete.”

There’s still a problem. As mentioned above, there were only ever going to be six episodes in the series, so there’s nothing to cancel, because no more episodes were planned anyway.

This is a petition to get Netflix Amazon to stop making something they stopped making before the petition existed. This is like throwing stones at the moon to stop a solar eclipse, then expecting to celebrate when the eclipse ends because the stone throwing worked.

Now, of course, the petition has a new goal of 35,000 signatures. Given how hilariously this whole thing went sideways on them, it’s unlikely they’ll reach that goal, so it gets them out of the further embarrassment of actually turning in the results to Amazon, who would ignore it anyway because there was never going to be a second season to cancel in the first place.

It’s just our observation here, but perhaps they should quit while they’re ahead.

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