In Which Preacher Becomes A Cross For Ruth Negga To Bear

Prayer for the Dying

by ETHAN PETERSON

Preacher
creators Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
AMC

"Wouldn't it be great," said no one ever, "if we introduced the entire cast of a rural Texas town, and then savagely murdered them at the end of an anticlimactic first season of this adaptation of a graphic novel no one in their right mind has ever read to completion?" Garth Ennis' writing on his long-form comic Preacher always paled to his run on The Punisher. The difference between the two stories was crucial: one story, Preacher, believed that it was hilarious, and the other took itself seriously.

Preacher was not hilarious, and decades after its original publication the shock value has largely worn off as well. Sadly, the same is true of this second season of Preacher, airing on AMC. Through three episodes of this generic gods and monsters story, there has been exactly one moment worth savoring. Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is wandering aimlessly around New Orleans, which looks something like a sewer. He asks everyone he sees if they know where God is, and boy does he ask a lot of people this. Amazingly, no one wants to talk about the subject with Jesse, which runs counter to my experience of the American South.

Eventually he arrives at a bartender eager to help him find God. They take him to the basement, where a card-carrying member of the AARP hands him a blue dildo and shows him this:

You see God is Dog backwards. This would maybe be good for half a laugh, except Preacher refers to this knee-slapper like three more times. This humorous moment was preceded by the intro to the episode, wherein a teen girl shot herself in the head with a shotgun because she kissed a friend of hers.

Preacher had an intriguing slate of characters they decided to kill off; I still don't quite understand why they thought it was necessary to do this so soon. Lucy Griffiths played this really attractive churchgoer, for example. We are left with Jesse's two traveling companions: Tulip (Ruth Negga) who would be somewhat interesting if she were not hopelessly devoted to Jesse already, and the vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) who transparently explains every single emotion and thought that comes into his head. These two dullards turn Preacher into the biggest snoozefest of a road trip you can imagine.

Included to spice things up are Jesse's various enemies, who virtually all resemble caricatures of Nazis. It's weird to see the malefactors that Ennis came up with, since the villains of The Punisher are all very subtle: a whoremaster with a nose for business, a Soviet general with a novel concept of patriotism, a fearful, homosexual spy. I can think of many plausible enemies of God, but the only ones who could really manifest themselves as a threat to Him are human, since they cannot conceive of the fullness of His existence.

Instead a litany of angels and demons are paraded before us. They cannot die, but they can be rendered inert, like a dangerous gas. They have no individual agency that could lead to a meaningful choice; instead their are destined to have problems identical to those they sought to overcome at the moment of their creation. This gives Preacher all the narrative momentum of a Saturday morning cartoon series.

Jesse's essential power, of course, is that he can make any human being do exactly as he wishes. This is a gimmick entertaining for a scene or maybe half a scene. Sometimes his instructions have slightly unintended consequences, but mostly they afford him a slight advantage in combat or a way to put an end to any pending negotiation. How they turned the idea of a reverend who could fight and have sex into such a boring production I will never fully understand.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Remain Your Devoted Preacher

Todd Solondz Memorial Show

by ETHAN PETERSON

Preacher
creator Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
AMC

It's not every day you see a show kill off every single character that made it worth watching, and leave all the offending portions for what will no doubt be a turgid second season. It would be like Pheobe Buffet walking around in a New York City razed by methane gas explosions, playing "Smelly Cat" for deer. Preacher did just what it promised, though, and destroyed something far more entertaining in the process.

Emily Woodruw (the enigmatic Lucy Griffiths) was the best of these deceased characters, a single mother of three who was dating the town of Annville's shrewish mayor, Miles (Ricky Mabe). "He pursued me like forever," she tells Tulip (Ruth Negga), before moments later deciding to murder him for what he has done to her life.

I don't fully know what happened to Todd Solondz' Hollywood career, but there are lots of things that never would have ever been made if he did not create now-forgotten classics like Welcome to Dollhouse and Happiness. Solondz sort of went off the rails and started producing the same movie over and over again, probably because no else was serious about advancing his formula.

The problem with Solondz is that the world caught up too quickly with his particular brand of satire. When you live in a society where Miss Teen USA addresses her friends with racial slurs and barely even apologizes for it, there's not a whole lot further you can push the self-loathing. The comic on which Preacher bases itself was never even satire at all. The larger-than-life figures that Preacher set up as antagonists for Jesse Custer in season two are the flattest and most boring part of the show adapted as they are so faithfully from the graphic novels.

Where Preacher really took off was when it hewed so much closer to reality than its source material. Really, this show was on the verge of becoming quite different, of answering the disturbing questions it poses to its residents. The mother with a daughter in a coma, the father with a son that had a suicide wish, even the love story of the man who ran the methane processing plant were all more real than the ostensible protagonist, Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper and his fantastic Texas accent).

Solondz depicted men and women in the throes of whatever passion allowed them to carry on the rest of thei turgid lives. These singular moments allowed them the grace to survive whatever else befall them, or whatever harm they carried out on others. Preacher's amazing character of Odin Quincannon (Jackie Earle Haley) was the epitome of this devilish philosophy, and the storyline of him being commanded to love God was the most amusing and meaningful part of the show.

Despite the fact that the role of Custer is a thankless one, Dominic Cooper did the best he could with it. The writing for his romantic counterpart Tulip O'Hare was pretty terrible throughout. An actress as subtle as Ruth Negga does so much more with an eyebrow raise or a look than the show's writers could accomplish by forcing her one-liners. In the end, however, there is not a whole lot of desire to watch Preacher as a love story. The show is rendered static by the lack of drama on that front.

It would have been better if Preacher had chucked its source material in the trash and written a completely different type of story. Nothing is really accomplished by seeing Jesse Custer's hometown levelled to the ground, along with all the people in it.

If Preacher focuses on the broader humor and characters that accomplished so much less, we will still have this bravura first season, which did so many things that television never attempted. At times Preacher was fully as disturbing as any Todd Solondz movie. It was maybe not the must-look-away cringeworthy of the films that inspired it, but it was also a lot more fun to watch Jesse play around with the Genesis power that allows him to tell people exactly what to do.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which Seth Rogen And Evan Goldberg Enter The American South

God Magic

by ETHAN PETERSON

Preacher
creators Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Sam Caitlin
AMC

It sounds like the setup for a twisted joke. Two Jews make a television show about Jesus Christ. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, when they are not driving the people in neighboring offices to insanity through the odiferous smell of their pot smoking, did not exactly pick up the Bible before making Preacher. If they did, it certainly was not the New Testament.

The graphic novel Preacher was about as knowledgeable about America as Seth Rogen is about the Gospel of Matthew. Preacher was one of many works by European writers attempting to depict what was happening in the country in the world producing most of the world's visual media. By caricaturing America in the same way America did to them, writers like Ennis, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman levelled the playing field.

The graphic novel Preacher isn't really offensive in its rampant violence, which seems basically tame now, or its view of Christianity, which is more a silly appreciation than actual critique. Preacher's broader caricatures are harsh parodies of people in the American south, all easy targets.

Not being native to Texas, writer Garth Ennis ran out of jokes about the region and Preacher turned into a pretty serious story about what a man does when he loses faith and how he acts when he regains it, if he ever does. Of course it does not really matter if you pray to God if he does not really exist. In the world of Preacher, he does, but he is not the only one of his kind. Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is the protagonist and titular character, whose interaction with an angel-demon hybrid gives him the power of command.

Cooper is a tiny man, but this only adds to his considerable charm, since he has to find a way to impress us as a person without using his physique or literal momentum. The first fight scene in Preacher occurs after Jesse encourages a local woman to file a complaint against her husband. It turns out the abuse of the wife is at her own request (!), and instead of apologizing, Jesse breaks the man's arm and beats up his friends. This outcome adds to the general sense that the main characters in Preacher may not exactly be the most God-fearing folks.

Take Jesse's ex-girlfriend Tulip (Ruth Negga). I remember her being so much more likable in the comic, where she wasn't explaining what a sterling examplar of womanhood she is all the time. In the pilot episode of Preacher, she builds a bazooka with a couple of children out of soup cans. It's completely unclear why this should make her sympathetic; in fact she would be the most monstrous character on this show if it were not for Jesse's vampire friend Cassidy.

The long Cassidy sections were the worst part of the comic, and yet their utter lack of narrative seriousness was a welcome relief from Garth Ennis' at times dreary tone. We learn Cassidy is undead very early on. This revelation would have been far better somewhere down the line — it means nothing when Preacher begins, and it has been approximated so many times in the last twenty years.

I figured Rogen and Goldberg would focus on what Preacher actually does do well, which is a stylized form of violence which at times and in certain lights resembles prayer. It takes real skill to make action so seamless it comes across in a delightful space between accuracy of purpose and choreography, and that is missing in AMC's Preacher. Rogen and Goldberg's take on Preacher remains entertaining because the subject matter and setting are still quite unique, but so far the killing takes a serious backseat to the large, slowish characterization. It is a welcome upending — more Sydney Pollack than Quentin Tarantino.

The most chaotic moments of Preacher have Rogen and Goldberg overmatched, since they do not know where to put the camera and it feels like they are recreating fights they've seen before. They have replaced that stylized violence with an actual understanding of these characters. Despite their inadequacies, you can really feel the world of Preacher is something they have thought about more deeply than Ennis ever did, and it is wonderful to see the world of the graphic novel find more stable roots in the drama of more realistic human lives.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Julian Fellowes' Doctor Thorne.

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