Thoughts on the Preacher pilot

AMC’s Preacher pilot has an impossible task. It’s trying to adapt one of the most profane, sexually transgressive, and violent comics of all time as a TV show. Putting it on basic cable raises the bar for what you’re allowed to show, but clearly nowhere near enough. Preacher (the comic) was more defined by its willingness to go there than almost any work of fiction I’ve ever seen – which isn’t to say it was nothing but shock value, just that the constant swearing, twisted sexuality, near-total hostility to religion, and graphic violence gave it an essential flavour. It was anarchic and hilarious, but it was also self-aware, dramatically compelling, and essentially idealistic in the way of a traditional Western. Plus, it had Odin Quincannon molesting a giant doll made of meat.

Watching the pilot gives you an idea of the precise restrictions under which the show’s operating. There’s plenty of gore, delivered with an early Peter Jackson splatter-film enthusiasm, as if it’s trying to compensate for something. A man bursts into a shower of blood and meat in the first five minutes. Jesse Custer breaks another man’s arm and bone peeks out. Cassidy (the immortal vampire) jumps out of a plane and lands with a splat that disgorges his intestines. It’s trying, in a way which makes the communal reluctance to swear amusing.

Less amusing and more irritating is the show’s sanitisation of Preacher’s full-throated contempt for religion. A running joke about people vandalising a church sign is all that remains. It’s been replaced with a dime-a-dozen story of a man who can’t hear God speak to him anymore and is losing his faith (Jesse Custer) deciding to renew his commitment to his calling. If you’ve read the source material, where Jesse was forced to become a preacher after over a decade of physical and psychological abuse, and it was never framed as anything other than a damaging choice, the show’s take on this storyline can’t be anything but a perversion. I can see why they’ve chosen to go this route – they’re likely afraid of alienating religious demographics or garnering bad press by faithfully adapting a story where a disillusioned preacher is trying to hunt down God to make him pay for the misery of his creation.

Setting aside its divergences from the comic, the show’s pilot has a bigger problem – it isn’t particularly good. There are a lot of imaginative stylistic flourishes (my favourite being a match cut from Cassidy jumping out of a plane to ketchup splatting on a plate) , but it’s long on style, short on content. Jesse is morose and depressed in an inert, dramatically uninteresting way. He was involved in some kind of criminal enterprise with Tulip, and she’s trying to bring him back for the age-old One Last Job. He’s become a preacher because he made a promise to his dad, just before his dad was shot. He mostly sits around, drinks, and once beats up an abusive husband. The town of Annville is fodder for achingly contemporary jokes about replacing politically incorrect sports mascots and the slippery slopes of Southern prejudice. It’s depressingly by-the-numbers.

Getting away from Jesse, the show’s versions of Cassidy and Tulip offer more entertainment, if not more originality. Cassidy being ambushed by a crusader cult suggests there’s going to be a larger mythology built around his vampirism than there was in the comic, which is a smart move. Tulip is so hyper-competent while MacGyver-ing an impromptu rocket launcher out of cans, moonshine, and fertiliser – recruiting a boy and a girl to help her and doling out nuggets of feminist wisdom – that it becomes funny. But at least she’s doing something, until she comes to Annville and is reduced to waiting around for Jesse to wise up and join her, while trying to persuade him with such original non-tautologies as ‘We did what we did. We are who we are, and that’s it, you know?’ The unengaging, morose faux-drama of their reunion is so far away from its precursor in the comic – which had an electric charge of resentment and latent desire – that it’s almost painful to watch. 

The occasional flashes of humour and creativity, and the competent action sequences mean that it’ll likely be well-received – I can see it already is – and it’s mildly entertaining. Still, when you’re adapting one of the most uproariously entertaining comics of all time, that’s a depressingly mediocre outcome. It's nowhere as awful either on its own, or for how it bastardises the source material, as NBC's Constantine or Fox's Lucifer (the ultimate example of a great Vertigo comic being turned into generic network fodder), and in that respect it represents an improvement on the trend. But my advice is, read the comic instead.