Amazon Prime Video will make this summer a little more heavenly with the premiere of Good Omens Season 2, which will once again star Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale and David Tennant as the demon Crowley. Based on the newly-released trailer, however, the similarities to Season 1 may be pretty limited! Jon Hamm’s Gabriel may not be the nemesis that he was the first time around, and Crowley and Aziraphale are in a sticky status quo after alienating themselves from both Heaven and Hell. The footage also features something that was cut from Season 1, so check out the new trailer and then keep on reading for what was cut and what it could mean!
What Was Cut From Season 1
If you’re anything like me, you were expecting to hear a song or two from Queen cut into the footage of the trailer, after how Season 1 included plenty of Freddie Mercury’s vocals and the running Queen joke from the book penned by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett. Instead, an instrumental version of “Everyday” played before Buddy Holly’s version picked up.
While it could have just been a fun choice for a trailer that fans with an Amazon Prime Video subscription have been waiting many days for, “Everyday” also happens to have been planned for Season 1 before being cut, as Neil Gaiman revealed in 2019 in The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book. The co-author, who also is a showrunner, executive producer, and writer for the show, wrote this about Season 1:
In the scripts, Buddy Holly's song 'Every Day' runs through the whole like a thread. It was something that Terry had suggested in 1991, and it was there in the edit. Our composer, David Arnold, created several different versions of 'Every Day' to run over the end credits. And then he sent us his Good Omens theme, and it was the Good Omens theme. Then Peter Anderson made the most remarkable opening credits to the Good Omens theme, and we realised that 'Every Day' didn't really make any sense any longer, and, reluctantly, let it go. It's here, though. You can hum it.
Apparently, “Everyday” was planned for the first season of Good Omens, based on a suggestion from Terry Pratchett nearly two decades prior at the time. The scripts in the book continue to feature scenes where a version of the song would play, and it’s easy to understand why Gaiman described it as a “thread” through the whole season in the script stage. It seems unlikely that the trailer was scored with this song merely as a nod to the original plan for Season 1 and Pratchett’s pitch, based on a blink-and-you-ll-miss-it moment from the trailer.
What The Trailer Says About The Song
Less than ten seconds into the trailer, there’s a shot of Aziraphale reading a newspaper clipping, and that shot lingers long enough without panning to the newly-arrived Crowley that it’s bound to be significant. As somebody who was willing to pause and squint, I can say that the text of the article that Aziraphale is perusing can be read, and the introduction says:
A strange phenomenon has got the locals of The Resurrectionist pub in Edinburgh scratching their heads and tapping their feet. For no matter what song they put on the pub’s jukebox, it will only play one tune: Buddy Holly’s Everyday. Proprietor Mr Tulloch is at a loss to explain it.
The article goes on to say that the jukebox engineer said that “it’s never been tampered with and can’t explain it either.” On the one hand, this sounds pretty similar to the book’s explanation for how Queen is always playing in Crowley’s car. On the other hand, the only element from the article that was even mentioned in Season 1 was Edinburgh, which Crowley and Aziraphale briefly discussed twice, most notably in their Shakespeare era (in a scene that almost couldn’t happen) when they flipped a coin for who would have to go to Scotland for a temptation and some blessings.
So, what does the use of “Everyday” in this trailer mean for Crowley and Aziraphale? Does the reference to Edinburgh actually mean anything? Will there be any Queen in Season 2, or more of Buddy Holly’s discography? We can only speculate on those fronts for the time being, just as we can only guess about the Easter eggs in the opening credits sequence released by Prime Video. The good news is that the days are ticking down until the end of hiatus, and Season 2 of Good Omens will premiere in the 2023 TV premiere schedule on Friday, July 28.
