Preacher: Pilot   Books Included 
May 23, 2016 8:33 PM - Season 1, Episode 1 - Subscribe

Fulfilling a promise to his deceased father, one-time outlaw Jesse Custer returns home to West Texas to take over his dad's church as a small-town preacher. And then things get weird.
posted by filthy light thief (28 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
A few surprises here. It seems that the writers have decided that they aren't bound by the book canon, which is good, because the canon is totally bonkers and wouldn't work at all in a TV context. I kept waiting for Jesse to explodify his congregation and it just... never happened. I wonder how they are going to get him out of the town.

I found that it looked oddly cheap and amateurish, like a 90s student film shot on early digital video. Particularly that opening space shot. An odd choice.

Cassidy is obviously going to be a show stealer.

The sheer joy on Jesse's face when he was beating up the Confederacy of Dunces was a nice touch.

A Tulip of colour! That's going to make some assholes very angry. I look forward to that. And a nice baseline sass level.

'Africa' is not a country, show.

All in all, not a bad start. A bit shaky, but what pilot isn't?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 10:24 PM on May 23, 2016 [4 favorites]


Yeah, it was shaky, but pilots usually are. I like the casting; it's nice seeing Ruth Negga again after AoS, and Joseph Gilgun as Cassidy is a hoot. I'm looking forward to the next one, I just wish we didn't have to wait two weeks.
posted by homunculus at 10:49 PM on May 23, 2016


I found that it looked oddly cheap and amateurish, like a 90s student film shot on early digital video. Particularly that opening space shot. An odd choice.
His thoughts were red thoughts, I think that's kind of the point. It's applying the kind of stoner-slacker logic that leads to doing bong rips and watching B-movies for hours to the binge-watch TV event. The opening sequence was totally "Haha! Bad scifi movies, right! Yeah! Dude, pass the pretzels!" I don't think it necessarily makes for bad TV - viz. Spaced, or Misfits (in which Joseph Gilgun starred and Ruth Negga featured) in the UK. I'm not sure there's a US equivalent that would count as a predecessor - From Dusk Til Dawn, maybe, for the schlock factor. There's evidence of Seth Rogen's paws all over this which I was sceptical of at first, but the more I think about just how bonkers the source material is the more I realise Rogen is probably the only person with the clout and the crazy to make this happen.

Especially given the horrendous stinking shit sandwiches served up by Constantine and Lucifer. At least this is watchable.
posted by prismatic7 at 12:37 AM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think you're right, prismatic7. The RedThoughts consort made the same point. I just found it jarring.

Re the bonkers, I think they're easing the audience into it. I mean, they have Arseface. That likely means Sherriff Root has limited time on this earth. And that will be an interesting scene indeed.

At this point, I'm just curious as to what drives Jesse to leave town to chase down God, given his declaration of devotion, and the fact that he didn't blow it up when Genesis merged with him. Maybe he'll stub his toe and shout 'DAMN THIS WHOLE STUPID TOWN TO HELL!'
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 12:59 AM on May 24, 2016


I dunno, it was better than I thought it was going to be, given Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are producing it. I'm totally okay with softening a lot of the misogyny/bestiality/sexual assault of the comics because the comic itself really doesn't age well. (A lot of that violent iconoclastic comic world from the 90s is worth remembering for what it was at the time, but not worth dragging onscreen now.)

Again, Gilgun and Negga are just gonna steal it for me.
posted by Kitteh at 6:17 AM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


It has been quite a few years since I've read the comic, but I did enjoy the premier! Tulip seemed much more assured in her own skin in here than I remember her in the comic (but, again, I'll have to reread the first few). I mostly remember her having a handgun and being afraid to use it. I don't remember her making a homemade bazooka. But I am ALL ABOARD making Tulip even more bad ass than she was in the comics.

It bothers me that we can see Cassidy's eyes, as that was such an import event in the books when Tulip finally saw them.

Arseface is much less comical than in the books, but that is necessary, because we wouldn't have ANY respect for him then. I'm impressed with the prosthetics that make his face workable and believable and still true to character.

I actually loved the B-movie feel of that opening sequence. It added the grit that was what the original comics looked and felt like.

They really got the quiet, still, deadness of Jesse's loss of faith, I think. That scene in daylight where he gets out of the truck and stands there a while before he goes in to the meat processing plant... Just quiet and still and day-old dead like roadkill. There is an absence.

Jesse's half-grin when he kicking ass in the bar... yep. And Cassidy kicking that chair in... Oh, boy. This is gonna be fun!

I think people just like making shows about guys in cowboy boots and cowboy hats getting in fights. I can't complain. I like watching 'em.

So, uh, His thoughts were red thoughts, I think in honor of this comic/show, your name should be "His words were red words". :)
posted by jillithd at 6:47 AM on May 24, 2016


I've read the books as recently as last year. Some thoughts...

1) I actually like what they're doing here. It was pretty obvious in the show that Genesis is searching for a host. Given that all of the dead preachers (Tom Cruise?! Seriously loved that gag) were sort of extreme, it seems natural that Genesis finds its way to Jesse - both of them are beings of the light and the dark. Perfect fit.

1.5) Okay - so one thing I can't remember is exactly WHY God takes off for a while...was it due to fear of Genesis, because the seraphim screwed up and let him out? But with all the evil in the world, it seems that Jesse's going to need motive to hold God accountable. And that's when he leaves town....

....unless the show runners decide to give him some kind of other quest....

2) Anyone notice that the silhouette on Jesse's whiskey bottle looks a lot like the Saint of Killers?

3) Really like Cassidy. I am struggling a bit with the accent, but that'll get easier.

4) Like what they've done with Tulip. The bazooka scene with the kids had me giggling.

I actually like the sort of "cheapish" feel of the way it's shot, mostly because it really does remind me of some really sad, falling-apart Texas towns I've visited.

The trailers for next week seem to indicate a lot more dialogue between Cassidy and Jesse - this was always something I liked about the books. Also wondering if there is going to be a John Wayne angle here...

I am optimistic.
posted by Thistledown at 7:04 AM on May 24, 2016 [3 favorites]


I also haven't read the comics in 10 years or more, but there are certain scenes that stick with you, and the exploding congregation was one of them. I had to go look up the comic synopsis to see if I'd remembered wrong (I hadn't). I thought, given how iffy the character is, that they did a decent job with Arseface. Now I am just waiting for the Saint of Killers to appear.

Cassidy is already stealing the show. From the second he appeared on screen. Tulip was delightful as well.

It's weird, I'm not quite watching it as a new viewer, but almost, so I am expending too much viewing time trying to remember whether these are things I've seen before. I will need to let go. Preacher was always my favourite Ennis, although I do have a love/hate thing with The Boys.

Oh, I don't remember the two obviously-nonhuman guys in matching outfits from the comics. Can someone remind me? Or is that too spoilery?
posted by tracicle at 8:01 AM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


(I think those guys are angels tracking down the Angel/Demon spirit baby.)
posted by jillithd at 8:05 AM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


"A Tulip of colour! That's going to make some assholes very angry."

Maybe so, but given that Tulip has a white southern belle accent, there's some serious problems from the other direction, too.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:34 AM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Tulip seemed much more assured in her own skin in here than I remember her in the comic (but, again, I'll have to reread the first few). I mostly remember her having a handgun and being afraid to use it.

Just picked up & read the first four issues the other day. She uses the pistol - with fear and awkwardness, but she pulls the trigger - literally within the first few panels of her appearance.
posted by phearlez at 10:45 AM on May 24, 2016


Tulip in the comics varies over time in terms of assuredness depending on what has happened to her. She is a trained gun user however, and a good shot, there is a segment where we see her father train her when she is young, before he dies in a shooting accident.
posted by biffa at 1:16 PM on May 24, 2016


Anyone notice that the silhouette on Jesse's whiskey bottle looks a lot like the Saint of Killers?

The brand name is Ratwater, which is from the comic. It's the town where the Saint of Killers is killed, and where he comes back to kill everyone in the town (and if that sounds familiar, yes, it's very similar to a scene in Stephen King's first Dark Tower book).
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:25 PM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


"A Tulip of colour! That's going to make some assholes very angry."

Maybe so, but given that Tulip has a white southern belle accent, there's some serious problems from the other direction, too.


I don't quite understand. Is it so improbable that a brown person would have that accent?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:08 PM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


I enjoyed this so much more than I imagined I would! Never read any of the source materials. I don't care for Rogen's style of comedy, but I think he was actually an excellent choice for this. Thoughts, in no particular order:

*I thought the opening was brilliant. Like MST3K mixed with otherwise well done VFX.

*Visually, the show is much more interesting than anything recently on TV. It doesn't all work, but between the on-screen text, camera work, color, and editing they're throwing a billion things at the screen. Most of them work without becoming some Tony Scott-like visual vomit.

* I love pretty much every actor on the show. Whoever did the casting is very talented/lucky.

* I do not understand Buttface at all, but I think the interaction with him was incredibly touching. Which is not something I thought I'd ever type.

* The Irish actor's accent is right at the limits of what I can actually understand. He is hilarious and very charismatic, but I had to rewind 3 or 4 times to catch some of the best lines.

* Tulip's whole introduction from the corn field, to the kids, to the bazooka was great.

* The whole scene with the post-bail Preacher in the van was great. Especially the iPad smashing. That was my favorite combination of editing, acting, and camera work.

PS I was once friends with a black woman from Waco who sounded very similar to Tulip.
posted by lattiboy at 4:26 PM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


"I don't quite understand. Is it so improbable that a brown person would have that accent?"

Yes. It's because of the history of African-Americans here -- slavery and segregation. Black Americans in the past were very distinctly a language group. This is less true today, but still true. AAVE is related to southern white English, but nevertheless distinct. And as black people moved from the south to the north and west, they carried with them both their culture and their dialect.

People will code switch, of course, but in that case they will switch from AAVE to prestige English -- which is not southern English. So a black person with a southern white accent is unusual. I've personally never met anyone like this, though I don't doubt that such people exist. They're probably from an unusual background. But to just cast a black woman and have her play a character with a southern white accent is a form of erasure, in my opinion. (Compare to True Blood with Sookie's and Tara's accents.)

The actor herself grew up in the UK and I'm not seeing any reason to give the production the benefit of the doubt about this. It looks to me like they started with the template of the southern redneck girl then cast a black actor and told her to use a "southern" accent. It's problematic in the general sense of just seeing all southerners are interchangeable, which is of a piece with the way they are handling the other accents, but it's much worse in this case because it just elides the specific southern black experience in doing so. Which is very typical in American culture, not to mention MetaFilter, where people will characterize all southerners as if they were all white rednecks and there weren't all those millions of black people living in the south. Meanwhile, southern black culture has been tremendously influential on American culture as a whole.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:45 PM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


So a black person with a southern white accent is unusual. I've personally never met anyone like this, though I don't doubt that such people exist. They're probably from an unusual background.

I think that's rather the point with show Tulip - that she has an unusual background (which all the characters do, in the books). She reads as mixed race to me (and Ruth Negga is Ethiopian/Irish). It's plausible that show Tulip had a white parent with a Southern belle accent, and grew up in that environment.

Incidentally, I'm a brown person with what might be considered a 'white' accent (albeit not an American one).
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:59 PM on May 24, 2016 [4 favorites]


I read the comic series as it was coming out, got bored with the increasingly absurd violence (shrugged off the queer=pervert=effeminate=villain stuff (and that was quite a shrug, I assure you)) and got even more bored with the increasing stupidity of the plot after feeling like I'd been promised neat shit about faith, monsters, damnation and absolution - stuff that never really materialized in all the butchery.

Reading a few trades in the middle of the run a month or so ago confirmed most of my negative feelings with few positive ones. It's just not that deep or interesting beyond the gore/pervert/sacrilege angles, with a tired set of macho sex tropes - ooh, fish-fucking! Nazi bondage queens! Dumb queer sex detectives! - swamping the few cool/odd ideas about God and redemption and friendship and love that only rarely peak out from the muck.

So I was glad to see the pilot diverge significantly from the comics, is what I'm saying. Let's hope it diverges even more next week.

(Oh and that Tom Cruise thing cracked me up and I loved the 50s b-movie intro but so much of the rest felt clichéd already that my hopes are not that high. At least Tulip and the kid passed the Bechdel Test early on.)
posted by mediareport at 6:14 PM on May 24, 2016 [2 favorites]


What with none of these characters being Steve Dillon identi-drones I barely knew who was who.
posted by turbid dahlia at 6:17 PM on May 24, 2016 [5 favorites]


Ruth Negga is amazing.

I never actually read the comic, but I've absorbed bits and pieces of it by osmosis over the years, so it'll be interesting to square the weird half-remembered stuff with what's actually going on.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:38 PM on May 24, 2016 [1 favorite]


Point of order, lattiboy, Joseph Gilgun is from Lancashire, England. He uses something pretty close to his natural accent in Misfits.

Of course, he's totally typecast here as a mouthy twat, but he's just so good at it...
posted by prismatic7 at 12:07 AM on May 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I loved it. It has the right tone and the feel of the comics. I'm looking forward to more and I'm hoping it gets picked up.
posted by Fizz at 3:05 PM on May 25, 2016


She reads as mixed race to me (and Ruth Negga is Ethiopian/Irish). It's plausible that show Tulip had a white parent with a Southern belle accent, and grew up in that environment.

Since Tulip herself is part Irish, I think they may be preserving the mixed-race into the character as well. Though I had the same kind of disjointedness - it's really weird when they put an actor of color into a character that is kind of devoid of the context of color, if that makes sense? So the actor has color, but it never impacts anything? It is weird. Though her smile is 100% Tulip, all the way.
posted by corb at 5:19 PM on May 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remember reading the first issue of the comic book and being instantly hooked at its brash boldness, while clearly setting up a story that was going somewhere. It took me, being really, really generous, a half hour to read that first issue.

After an hour of watching the show, I'm pretty bored and confused. Not just me either, my wife, who never read the comic was all WTF? The show spent a lot of time spinning wheels that I'm not convinced needed spinning.

It's fine that its going to be different than the comic, but that doesn't mean it should be boring.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:08 PM on May 25, 2016


However, we agreed that Tulip was pretty awesome. "Who likes arts and crafts?" WE DO WE DO, MRS. O'HARE.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:11 PM on May 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


If I wasn't already familiar with the comic, I would have signed out at the introduction of Cassidy - but I stuck around and wasn't disappointed but wasn't really thrilled either. It was just good enough to give it another chance.
posted by hoodrich at 7:09 PM on May 25, 2016


I personally liked the comic, I agree with the comments that it hasn't aged very well, but I have re-read it recently, and found it was still plenty of fun.

I disliked the episode very much, it is not Preacher, it is not a reimagining of Preacher, it is something that has just cannibalized another story for the parts that were deemed cool, and all the rest, including the whole story, was thrown away.

This utter disrespect for the original material is what irks me more about this episode. This isn't and adaptation of the Preacher comic, it isn't even inspired, it is something that is Preacher-flavoured (exaclty as the JJ Abrahms star trek movies).

I know that Ennis is on board as co-ex producer, I suppose he gets paid well in royalties and for his role on the series, so that's enough reason for him I suppose, but it also shows how much he respects his story himself.
posted by yann at 6:39 AM on May 27, 2016




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