'Preacher' starts slow on purpose so it can prime you for all the weird
Preacher opens with an accidental mass murder, an epic police shootout and a man taking a bullet to the junk.
The Preacher comic, that is. The new AMC series kicks off with an explosive cold open, but then proceeds to settle in for a comparably tame hour of character introductions and universe-building.
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"With the comic, the story hits the ground running and accelerates," said Garth Ennis, the creator of Preacher and executive producer on the TV series, in a chat with Mashable.
"[For] the TV show, you've got to ease back a little bit. Otherwise you'll just bewilder people. You'll just exhaust them."
That's why the Jesse Custer that Dominic Cooper plays on TV doesn't immediately resemble his comic book doppelganger. Introducing him as a burned out preacher man who keeps his faith at arms reach feels like it skips an emotional beat.
"You spend more time with Jesse in the little town," Ennis said of Preacher's early episodes. "You get to see him be a preacher; the everyday life of a Preacher in this little town."
Jesse's power -- to put the weight of god behind any verbal command, forcing the listener to comply -- doesn't manifest until the end of the episode. And even then, he barely realizes it.
"In the show, it's a more gradual process. He takes a while to understand what he's got. Misinterprets what he should do with it," Ennis said.
"The world is so extreme and so over the top and so vast."
This is where new characters like Emily Woodrow (played by Lucy Griffiths) are important. Emily is a fabrication of the TV series. She never appeared in the comics, but she helps to ground TV Jesse.
"You might say she's the quiet heart of it," Ennis said of Emily. "You need that normal person in there. The crush on Jesse helps. Also, the fact that she's a mother [and] a widow, I think that is her particular cross to bear."
In many ways, Emily is there to help draw the preacher character out of Preacher.
"It's her sense of looking for something spiritually, as well as just looking for a companion. Maybe she just wants answers."
This idea of people searching for answers speaks to what Ennis says is a big theme for the show's first season, which sticks primarily to the small west Texas town of Annville.
The constrained setting helps to keep the budget manageable for a show that's yet to prove itself, but there's also a powerful creative justification fueling it. Preacher's fictional universe is aggressively weird, and even in this post-Walking Dead world such a thing can be a tough sell.
"The world is so extreme and so over the top and so vast," showrunner Sam Catlin told Mashable. "It's Game of Thrones-Lord of the Rings-Simpsons vast, really, in terms of everything under the sun."
The first season's extended stay in Annville provides a taste of the familliar. Something "accessible and recognizable," as Catlin puts it. Comic book Jesse goes out and finds trouble, but TV Jesse works at sticking to his preacher's life as trouble comes to him.
"It just ratchets and ratchets and ratchets," Catlin said. "Hopefully by the end of the season, everyone -- not just Preacher fans -- will come to realize that ... anything can f*cking happen.
"It's almost like acclimating people to deep water diving, where you have to take them down in stages. That's sort of the idea of the first season: By the time [it] ends, people will know exactly what the rules are."
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Topics Comics
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
