Holy crap, I never knew that was him!
Also he voices Dalboz of Gurth in Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Oh, and he was the fear clown in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “The Thaw.” I’ve been seeing him everywhere lately.
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Amazon’s DRM blocks Google’s Chromecast for Android, and Chrome for Ubuntu
I watched this particular series on my big TV, but I’ve never had Amazon block any video I’ve tried to watch via Chrome on Fedora. Are you sure it isn’t just that you denied it permission to install the DRM module? I can even watch HBO shows via Amazon without issue. At worst it might only be 720p, but I’ve never been able to tell the difference.
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Peter Serafinowicz is a smoother, darker, more understated, less twitchy Crowley in the BBC Radio 4 production.
David Tennant’s Crowley is a bit more energetic and spiky, and while I am ok with his performance, I sense he was cast due in part to his larger fame and bankability. I like that his performance conveys a vulnerability that Serafinowicz’s performance does not.
David Sheen’s Aziraphale is enjoyable. I was ok with seeing his evolution from the angel who had to kick out Adam and Eve from The Garden to something more like a human being himself.
Was surprised that the Amazon Prime’s TV version of Newton Pulsifer wasn’t a bit more earnest and green. And I really wanted more crazed, “over the top” obsessiveness from witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell–man, I wanted a lot more out that that performance on screen.
They are all ok.
Differently good.
ETA: I included some complaints which I may regret later…
ETA 2: typos
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It can be possible for screen adaptations to be excellent in their own right while being terrible when seen through the lens of the original book.
The number one example of this for me is Bladerunner. An excellent movie in itself. If you try to link it to the utterly excellent Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? then it is a terrible movie because they only barely intersect in theme despite telling the same story. Better to see them as completely different works.
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Yeah, I realize that I was mainly thinking of fantasy/scifi films. Others upthread have pointed out plenty of genre drama that worked really well on the screen.
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That is so wonderful
I loved the series. Loved the book; have given several copies away. Both just absolutely left me smitten. I totally didn’t realize that Shadwell was Michael McKean until this thread. The series especially just felt like a love letter to me.
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This has to be the most amazing meta-comment of all time. My metaphorical cap is equally metaphorically doffed in your direction, sir!
I thought the narration was off too. A female Supreme Being can work though (eg. The Great Will of the Macrocosm in Excel Saga) but here the ineffableness just wasn’t coming though somehow.
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The gag with the M25 reminded me of Ataru’s jogging route in Urusei Yatsura. Was that bit in the original novel?
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Yup, a minor point of emphasis, actually.
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Maybe if it had been a British actress, something about an American accent didn’t seem to have the right je ne sais quoi to it. Cate Blanchett would have been epic.
Yup - it was one of the bits Crowley was quite proud of, he’d modified the plans, and at one point moved the survey markers about - it was a point of irony in the book that his work on creating the dread sigil hampered his efforts to get to Tadfield.
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I was expecting to love it, and was disappointed not to. Immediately prior to watching it I’d just been watching Fleabag and Legion, so it suffered in comparison to those two quite brilliant shows, producing a solid “meh”. The arch yet unsophisticated humor no longer appeals to me, the writing is merely adequate, and I ended up fast-forwarding to the only good bits which is where the two protagonists bounce off each other. It’s worth watching just for that.
I adore Peter Serafinowicz and loved the BBC radio dramatisation. I enjoyed the TV mini series too.
I read the book as more of a Gaiman fan than a Pratchett fan and thought it felt more Pratchett than Gaiman. My friend who is more of Pratchett fan than a Gaiman fan thought the opposite.
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I’ve started watching this on your recommendation, and hoo-boy, what a delicious satirical romp. I can see why the religious types don’t like it, but the story isn’t any crazier and stupider than the crap they put out. Thanks for turning me on to this.
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Phil Dick has had a lot of his work adapted to the big screen, but very little of it cleaves especially closely to the books.
That said, I thought the 2006 adaptation of A Scanner Darkly is the closest any cinematic adaptation of a book comes to its source material, with the possible exception of The Road (and that loses points because it’s hard to reproduce the weird effect of no punctuation in film)
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‘WIngs of Desire’ lite.
Interestingly, I find that, while the two works are in two almost completely different ballparks, it still really helps Blade Runner if you’ve read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep because of how much world building from the book is included in the movie without being explicitly stated. There’s no mention of Mercerism in the film, or any overt mention of the ideals of animal ownership that lead to the titular electric sheep of the book, but if you’re aware of those concepts, you notice that every question on the Voight-Kampff test is, like the book, culturally biased to try and elicit an emotional response by using cruelty to animals. You can actually watch Rachael screw up some of the questions by saying she’d kill a wasp, or reacting to the idea of a nude model, instead of the bear-skin rug she’s described as being on. So it’s weird in that you’re absolutely right about the film not being an adaptation of the ideas of the book, but you can still somehow get a lot more out of the film having read the book.
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