Post by Ripley on May 19, 2016 12:08:18 GMT -5
Slate piece on Preacher, which takes some notes from TWD.
AMC’s stylish, wry, blasphemous new series deserves to become as big a hit as The Walking Dead
"AMC has had tremendous earthly success adapting comic books into television shows. The Walking Dead, based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series, has been dinged by critics but has nonetheless infected the brains of a huge audience; the show has been a massive hit for the network. Two series have been spun off it, the scripted drama Fear the Walking Dead and the post–Walking Dead debrief, Talking Dead. On Sunday night AMC will debut Preacher, an adaptation of a beloved ’90s comic book written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Steve Dillon, and cross its fingers that vampires, angels, demons, gods, various other supernatural beings, and a character named Arseface—because his face looks like, well, you know—will appeal to as many people as zombies. (The after-show, laughably titled Talking Preacher, is already in place.) As a television critic, I, too, can only wait to see if the stylish, funny, wry, blaspheming Preacher will go over nearly as well as the undead, but I can say now: It deserves to.
...Preacher has been adapted, loosely, for TV by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Sam Catlin, the series’ showrunner and a producer on Breaking Bad. It begins in the far reaches of outer space, one that looks like something from a 1950s movie or a middle schooler’s project on the solar system. Something is moving out there, and this something makes its way to Earth, where it keeps diving into religious leaders—pastors, rabbis, Tom Cruise—briefly possessing them and then departing, leaving them worse for its visit. This thing, whatever it is, makes contact with Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), the titular preacher. Jesse is hard-drinking, hard-smoking, and lost—though, in the stylized spirit of Preacher, not so lost he forgets to apply hair products daily. Despite having serious doubts about the existence of God, he delivers half-hearted sermons to a half-full congregation at a small church in Annville, a small town in West Texas, where the sign outside, constantly being vandalized, says things like, “Open your ass and holes to Jesus.”
Cooper is often cast as a voluble, witty smartass with a mischievous streak, the promise of good times and trouble gleaming out of his beautifully lashed eyes. But in the first four episodes of Preacher, the only ones available to critics, Cooper plays Jesse as laconic and low-energy, a mood befitting a man in the midst of a depressive spiritual crisis, going through what amounts to a kind of withdrawal from his addiction to violence. Other characters step in to supply the fizz. Jesse’s ex-girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga) is all sugar and spice and nothing nice. She’s a ray of sunshine, if sunshine could kill you very quickly. Charming, impish, and extremely dangerous, she is turning bazooka-making into a kid-friendly activity when we first meet her. Even more antic than Tulip is Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun), a supernatural being with a thick Irish brogue and not an ounce of body fat who spends his immortality getting drunk and high on whatever is closest at hand. He and Jesse immediately become good mates, because, though the preacher is going through a mellow spell, he’s drawn to charismatic maniacs..."
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AMC’s stylish, wry, blasphemous new series deserves to become as big a hit as The Walking Dead
"AMC has had tremendous earthly success adapting comic books into television shows. The Walking Dead, based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series, has been dinged by critics but has nonetheless infected the brains of a huge audience; the show has been a massive hit for the network. Two series have been spun off it, the scripted drama Fear the Walking Dead and the post–Walking Dead debrief, Talking Dead. On Sunday night AMC will debut Preacher, an adaptation of a beloved ’90s comic book written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Steve Dillon, and cross its fingers that vampires, angels, demons, gods, various other supernatural beings, and a character named Arseface—because his face looks like, well, you know—will appeal to as many people as zombies. (The after-show, laughably titled Talking Preacher, is already in place.) As a television critic, I, too, can only wait to see if the stylish, funny, wry, blaspheming Preacher will go over nearly as well as the undead, but I can say now: It deserves to.
...Preacher has been adapted, loosely, for TV by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Sam Catlin, the series’ showrunner and a producer on Breaking Bad. It begins in the far reaches of outer space, one that looks like something from a 1950s movie or a middle schooler’s project on the solar system. Something is moving out there, and this something makes its way to Earth, where it keeps diving into religious leaders—pastors, rabbis, Tom Cruise—briefly possessing them and then departing, leaving them worse for its visit. This thing, whatever it is, makes contact with Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), the titular preacher. Jesse is hard-drinking, hard-smoking, and lost—though, in the stylized spirit of Preacher, not so lost he forgets to apply hair products daily. Despite having serious doubts about the existence of God, he delivers half-hearted sermons to a half-full congregation at a small church in Annville, a small town in West Texas, where the sign outside, constantly being vandalized, says things like, “Open your ass and holes to Jesus.”
Cooper is often cast as a voluble, witty smartass with a mischievous streak, the promise of good times and trouble gleaming out of his beautifully lashed eyes. But in the first four episodes of Preacher, the only ones available to critics, Cooper plays Jesse as laconic and low-energy, a mood befitting a man in the midst of a depressive spiritual crisis, going through what amounts to a kind of withdrawal from his addiction to violence. Other characters step in to supply the fizz. Jesse’s ex-girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga) is all sugar and spice and nothing nice. She’s a ray of sunshine, if sunshine could kill you very quickly. Charming, impish, and extremely dangerous, she is turning bazooka-making into a kid-friendly activity when we first meet her. Even more antic than Tulip is Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun), a supernatural being with a thick Irish brogue and not an ounce of body fat who spends his immortality getting drunk and high on whatever is closest at hand. He and Jesse immediately become good mates, because, though the preacher is going through a mellow spell, he’s drawn to charismatic maniacs..."
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