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For fans of Prime Video’s Good Omens concerned that they’d never get the final chapter of Aziraphale and Crowley’s story amid the ongoing controversy surrounding creator Neil Gaiman’s sexual misconduct and abuse allegations, there’s finally some good news — and some bad, as well. Prime Video has revealed its plans for the property, and in the process, perhaps laid out a pathway for studios dealing with similar situations in the future.

After officially shelving plans for a third season of the series in September, Prime Video announced last week that Good Omens will finish not with a full third season, but with one feature length episode that will not include Gaiman as a producer. (He did, however, “contribute” to its writing; to what degree is, at this point, still unknown.) According to the Hollywood Reporter, Gaiman “offered to step away… to let the production go forward and conclude the story.”

While the decision to reduce what had initially been announced as a full season to one 90-minute episode is likely to upset fans of the show, Prime Video’s choice to wrap the show up in any form rather than let it remain perpetually unfinished should be taken as a sign of its appreciation of the talent involved — Gaiman aside, obviously — and its audience.

It’s a depressing reality that the allegations surrounding Gaiman — which center around a number of women coming forward to report Gaiman sexually assaulting them and/or pressuring them into relationships they did not want, as initially reported by a Tortoise Media podcast series titled Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman — are not a unique occurrence. Indeed, in some respects, the Gaiman allegations are similar to those leveled against writer Warren Ellis some years earlier.

What Prime Video has done in regards to Good Omens, in effect attempting to separate the artist from the art and attempting to provide closure to the audience while simultaneously shuttering an income stream for the accused, feels like it might be an attempt to satisfy both moral and commercial demands arising from the circumstance at the same time. It’ll be curious to see how the (sizable, and passionate) fanbase for the show reacts not only to this decision, but to the final episode itself — not least because, should this approach prove successful in terms of the target audience, it offers a way forward for similarly stalled projects from creators whose behavior has come to light.

Will fans accept a final chapter that doesn’t come from the man responsible for the characters’ creation? (Well, the one man still alive; Good Omens was a co-creation with author Terry Pratchett, after all.) We’ll find out next year, I suspect. Good Omens’ final episode is set to film in early 2025, suggesting a late 2025 release.

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