Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Neil Gaiman wrote the adaptation himself and ran the show, having promised Terry Pratchett he would, which makes this an unusually direct line from book to screen. The first series follows the novel closely: Aziraphale and Crowley's arrangement, the misplaced Antichrist, Agnes Nutter's prophecies, the Four Horsemen updated, and the Them. Whole exchanges are lifted from the page. The one large addition is deliberate and acknowledged: the cold open covering six thousand years of the angel and the demon's friendship, written for the screen because the book carries that history in asides a camera cannot.

Pratchett and Gaiman's novel is a comedy of the Book of Revelation: the birth of the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen (here Four Bikers of the Apocalypse), and the final battle between Heaven and Hell, with an angel and a demon who have lived on Earth since Eden and would rather it continued.

Gaiman has been explicit that the finished voice of Good Omens is Pratchett's, and that Pratchett did the final assembly of the manuscript. The Discworld apparatus is all present: the footnote used as a second comic channel, an anthropomorphised Death who speaks in capitals, cosmic bureaucracy treated as an office problem, and a plot that arrives at decency by way of farce. Filed MEDIUM rather than HIGH because Pratchett is a co-author rather than an influence at arm's length. It is recorded because a reader tracing where the book's manner comes from is asking a real question, and Discworld is the honest answer.