Having created and finished two of the greatest shows to air on television with Breaking Bad and Mad Men, AMC has some holes to fill in its original programming. So, here comes Preacher, which may have the craziest pilot episode in recent memory. There's a lot to digest here, so hit the jump for my spoiler-y thoughts on last night's premiere.
I really want to know how many people are coming into this show with no idea of what the Preacher property is. I hope they like what they find, because this is show is completely off its rocker in the best of ways. I'm going to be careful here because the show has not revealed what the basic plot of the show is going to be yet, so I will not comment on what is to come. Needless to say, this is just a very small teaser of the shenanigans to come. So if you are at all put off by this first episode, feel free to turn back now. I have only read a few of the novels that this series is based on, but from what I have read I know that the show is going to get exponentially more controversial and radical from here. I am so damn excited.
The pilot covered a lot of introduction based ground, but they are only threads of story at the moment. Before we even meet our title Preacher, we open up with a freaky object of some kind flying through space. It eventually finds Earth and enters a poor African pastor, who proceeds to explode and rain goopy gore on his congregation. With this intro, we are shown what kind of nutsy show this will be. We are quickly introduced to our main characters afterward. We have Jesse Custer, a man with a dark and violent past who has returned to his small Texas home to take up his late father's old mantle of preacher at their small Christian congregation. We also meet Cassidy, who turns out to be an ultraviolent and very talkative vampire. In his first moments on the show, he decimates a plane full of possible religious cult members and jumps out of the plane. Despite being turned inside out when he hits the ground, he lives. Then we meet Tulip, who teaches a couple of kids how to make a homemade bazooka so she can blow up some ambiguous bad guys.
This is a whole lot of bizarre craziness to jump right into with a single pilot episode, but directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg handle it incredibly well. Most people may only associate them with their goofy stoner comedy flicks, but these two have actually built a name for themselves producing several impressive projects with their production brand. Preacher has always bee a dream project for the two and they, along with Breaking Bad's Sam Catlin, now have a chance to bring the cult graphic novel series to life on the screen. There is some confident and stylish direction going on here in this pilot episode that I am very impressed with. I will still need to see how they handle the plot after this point, but this is a terrifically entertaining start.
While the violence and dark comic elements are on point, I was impressed with the depth that this world and its characters have. Another character that makes his first appearance is a young kid named Eugene who is nicknamed "Arseface", due to a horrific facial scarring and disfigurement that makes the lower half of his face look vaguely like an anus. No kidding. This character could have easily been made into a freakish joke, but the first scene between him and the Preacher was incredibly sweet and sad. There is a genuine sorrow when Eugene opens up to Jesse about how he fears that God has abandoned him because of his sins. This also works as a wonderful foreshadowing of what is to come on the show and is a great and subtle way to introduce the themes that will come into focus.
So what are we left with at the end of this pilot? Jesse has been hit by some sort of weird space object and has the ability to dictate the actions of others. Because of this, he unintentionally causes a more annoying member of his congregation to cut out his own heart in front of his elderly mother. That was one hell of a closer for an episode that was already chock-full of insane scenes. Chronologically, this episode leads right up to the beginning of the original comics, so we will really see what this show is up to next week. I am really hoping that this level of quality sticks and the show evolves from here. The humor is sick and twisted, the action sequences are brutal, and the characters are unique and seriously weird. This will be one to pay attention to. I cannot wait for the crazy storm of controversy to begin. The regular public is going to really love this one.
Grade: A-.
Preacher airs every Sunday night on AMC.
Need more TV? Check out my latest review of Game of Thrones and my review of the season finale of Better Call Saul by following the links!
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