Preacher
AMC (Premieres Sunday, May 22 at 10/9 Central)
May 20, 2016 Web Exclusive
Preacher is adapted from the Vertigo Comics series of the same name. We might well be in a golden age of television adaptations of other properties: for instance, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and, recently, The Magicians. While it’s hard to extrapolate from a pilot whether Preacher will eventually reach a similar critical or popular success as those franchises, it’s certainly off to a very strong start.
A preexisting property has that dual edged sword: an ingrained fan base guarantees some pre-show buzz and some asses in the seats, and, on the flip side, high expectations from those fans about what the series should look like and what from the original canon should make the TV cut.
Full disclosure: I’m not coming to Preacher fresh; I read the damned thing in issues as they came out from 1995-2000, luxuriated in the painted Glenn Fabry covers, thrilled to the Steve Dillon interior art, let Garth Ennis be my tour guide in a truly incredible, discordant world. The most important things from the original series, in my book, were the sterling supporting cast, the poignant emotional undertone, and—perhaps most of all—the sensibilities and humor that ranged from the severely grotesque to the absurdly outlandish. The Preacher pilot seems to set this all up. It pretty quickly taps the essence off the bat of something the comic had the luxury of lurching and meandering toward: moments of quiet poignancy, displays of real friendship, a look at decisions and their consequences, all bookended by visceral bits of ultraviolence and supernatural and domestic horror.
The show opens with an African preacher being affected by something otherworldly that leads to temporary power, then a quick and grotesque demise—his congregation sitting at rapt attention the entire time. Contrast that with our first look at Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), the preacher who’s the lynchpin of the series; he’s giving a lackluster sermon in a ramshackle church to congregants who are something less than captivated. A man of faith without much faith, it seems. A man who’s trying to shed a troubled past, which may have caught back up with him in the form of Tulip, his ex-girlfriend. Ruth Negga, as Tulip, may well be the highlight of the show: dangerous and coy, not afraid to chomp a man’s ear off nor make a joke about it later, able to enlist random farm kids to help her out with some deadly arts and crafts projects that ultimately help her out of a jam. We see the first bonds of his friendship with Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun), secretly a vampire, not so secretly a barfly, who helps Jesse out during a barroom brawl. We meet Eugene, known in the comics as “Arseface,” due to his horrible disfigurement at the hands of a shotgun. His trademark enthusiasm and lack of understandability are firmly in place: the guy with the worst lot in life has the best attitude. They even give him subtitles so we can understand him.
We get to see a little of Jesse’s problem-solving skills, or lack thereof. Flashbacks of messages delivered by his father. An event similar to the one that afflicted our African preacher, but that affects Jesse differently somehow. An accidental power that he’s not even aware of yet, where his casual words to a parishioner cause the man to take Jesse’s words as commands, and rather literally at that. Jesse’s not even aware of this as the pilot comes to an end.
There are more characters, some drafted from the comic, some not, and who knows if they’ll prove to be series regulars or just first-episode window dressing. But the show has successfully put the pieces in place, and done it quickly, so we can get the story moving from here.
Just as in the comic, the show delivers classic lines at the drop of a hat, and I’ll leave you with a Jesse/Cassidy exchange that may well encapsulate what’s to come, or at least give you a feel for the tone:
JESSE: Years ago I made a promise. I broke it. Broke it a thousand times.
CASSIDY: You know promises—they’re nasty little things, I try to stay clear of them.
JESSE: That’s wrong.
CASSIDY: Why?
JESSE: Promises matter. As the currency of faith.
In any case: decent action, good world building, some funny stuff, some absurd stuff—all of which seems to promise the latest successful serialized screen adaptation of another pop culture property. (www.amc.com/shows/preacher)
Author rating: 8/10
Average reader rating: 9/10
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