‘Neil is furious’: Prime Video’s marketing team earns Neil Gaiman’s official stamp of disapproval

All is not well in the Good Omens fandom, and no one knows it better than the series’ showrunner and co-creator, Neil Gaiman, who has taken to social media to express his frustrations with Prime Video.

Recently, the network released a short video in celebration of Pride Month, but for some reason, its marketing team thought it was okay to slip in a spoiler for the second season of Good Omens. No, we won’t tell you what the spoiler is, but we can say it was a major one, which promptly led to it being shared like wildfire on several social media platforms, especially Twitter.

Although the video has since been deleted, this incident didn’t sit right with Gaiman, who has made a few statements on the subject in the past few hours. Like a lot of the author’s thoughts, the majority landed on Tumblr.

While heartbreak was Gaiman’s first response to learning about the spoiler, it didn’t take long for his disapproval of Prime Video to peek through. In another Tumblr post, when asked by a fan if the leak could be somehow related to Gaiman’s participation in the writers’ strike, the author responded:

“It’s hard to say. I’m on strike and not able to oversee every step of the promotion in the way that I normally would be, and because I’m on strike people aren’t running things by me in the way that they normally would. But the people who were overseeing it at Amazon knew better and it still went out somehow.”

Despite this being a reasonable explanation as to why Gaiman wasn’t consulted to approve the video, it clearly still stings. Unfortunately, not everyone got the memo that Gaiman’s frustration is legitimate, which led to the author having to spell it all out via Twitter, in less cordial language.

Make no mistake, though; despite Gaiman’s statements being in response to fans, the Good Omens creator has gone out of his way to emphasize that it’s Prime Video’s marketing team that he’s upset with, not the viewers who shared the spoiler:

“I don’t think the fans are jerks at all. (I’m not impressed by the marketing people who put it up in the first place, but they aren’t fans.) I understand the excitement of having something new and rushing to get it out to fellow fans. But that doesn’t make it any easier from my perspective.”

This is an important distinction to make, especially at a time in which tensions are high in the fandom. Over the last few hours, the fan excitement over the leaks has moved on to disappointment at having their favorite show spoiled, and frustration at other fans who refuse to take their screenshots down.

Just a few days ago, Good Omens fans were blissfully celebrating season two’s official trailer release, and now, the fandom is in shambles. Here’s to hoping it’s only smooth sailing from now on.