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So apparently the way entertainment news gets out nowadays is a guy walking into a comics shop and rapping with the owner about stuff his network is doing? Apparently Preacher—the Garth Ennis/Steve Dillon classic comic—is in development at AMC and a pilot has been ordered; it’s being viewed as a replacement for Breaking Bad and Mad Men, since Low Winter Sun should have been called Low Viewer Interest.

This news break kicked off when

Badass Digest broke the news:

Sources tell me that the network has ordered a pilot based on the classic Vertigo comic by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. In the comic Jesse Custer is a small town preacher who is torn by booze and sin and who finds himself the vessel for a strange entity – the child of a mating between an angel and a demon. Filled with immense power, including The Word of God, which makes anyone do whatever he says, Jesse goes hunting for the Lord Almighty, who has abandoned creation. He aims to make him pay for leaving his children behind. Joining Jesse on his journey is his ex-girlfriend Tulip, who is now a hit woman, and a hundred year old Irish vampire named Cassidy. Along the way they battle secret religious commandoes, the retarded descendent of Christ, a guy who fucks meat and even each other.


Preacher was published by Vertigo was for 75 issues or so, and was, while it was running, the most addictive, foul yet heartwarming soap opera of violence on the stands. Many have thought about adapting it for TV or screen including Kevin Smith, DJ Caruso and Sam Mendes. But is is also thought to be unproducable becuase of the sprawling story and blasphemous content.

The Badass story was backed up when a bigwig at AMC went into Escape Comics on Long Island and started rapping.

I accede that he’s correct and decide to just go for it, “So I guess you heard the rumors about AMC buying Preacher, huh?”
“Yeah, he says… I work there.”
So I get a bit flustered, especially after some more talk makes it clear that AMC has indeed purchased the rights, and start babbling about what a great book Preacher is, the sort of challenges they’re going to have, just geeking out basically.
“If you do it right, though, it could be VERY successful.”
“I hope so, we paid enough for it,” he deadpans.

As exciting as all this was, it got even more exciting when Seth Rogen, star and co writer of my favorite movie of 2013, This is the End, started TWEETING!


(Rogen is Canadian!!!)


So yeah. While the idea of Rogen as Jesse Custer is more horrifying than Arseface himself, one would think he is just producing, along with long time partner Evan Goldberg. While even that may sound alarming, This is the End was, in addition to being a deadly satire on our current me generation, a pretty gripping horror film about the end of the world that included monster demon dicks, angels and most of the elements that made Preacher great.

So…hopefully all this scuttlebutt and tweeting has some basis in reality because it would be totally cool if true.

11 COMMENTS

  1. I may be the only person in the universe who liked his GREEN HORNET. I liked the way the Green Hornet wasn’t the hero of the story, but everyone else (Kato, Cameron Diaz) was. It was a really funny way to turn our gender and racial stereotypes on their heads.

    And, yes, THIS IS THE END is wonderful. So I think Seth and Evan could do it. Casting? Less sure.

  2. Green Hornet is totally underrated. “We’ve been wasting our potential, Kato. You a little bit more than me.”

  3. I *LOVED* Green Hornet. It was a gentle, warm comedy with some action. Like the Be Kind Rewind guys put on masks. It was horribly misunderstood bu I think folks will come around a bit.

  4. “Preacher” is one of my favorite books, although I haven’t read it in over 5 years. My memory is that Jesse Custer’s initial quest at the beginning of the series was to find God, and tell him he was a worthless piece of shit that deserved a good deep fist-fucking. Memory may have exaggerated this a bit, but that’s essentially how I remember it. I’ve always doubted that even HBO would allow that aspect of the story to go forward. If done accurately, the Religious Right would place ending this series at the top of their agenda, even above arresting men for kissing each other.

    I can’t even imagine how they would react to the inbred retarded descendant of Jesus.

  5. You just have to look at shows like American Horror Story that are on right now to see that there will be no problems getting Preacher’s content made into a series. Sure there’s some parts of some story arcs that aren’t going to play out like the comic, but the Walking Dead television series is nowhere as intense and adult as the comic and it’s still entertaining.

  6. Ralph – American Horror Story doesn’t use words like “fuck,” and about 75 others that are regularly used in “Preacher.” The show also doesn’t engage in outright intentional blasphemy. Sure, basic cable nets like AMC and FX give me no worries in regard to gore and violence. But “Preacher” is about a rag-tag group of people intent in bringing down the Biggest Bad Guy of All – the Christian God half of the country prays to. Along the way we learn that Jesus had been sticking it to Mary Magdalene, and that their children have been kept quiet – forced to inbred for two thousand years, and are now crap-eating retarded morons.

    “Preacher” is essentially “Inglorious Bastards” – except many of the Bastards have supernatural powers, and they are fighting Christianity instead of Nazis. AHS, as extreme as it gets in certain areas, doesn’t even come close in potential controversy.

  7. Yes, they might have to clean “Preacher” up a bit to work on TV. But there’s already another series about God stepping away from his duties that’s been on for years: “Supernatural.” Of course, if “Preacher” premieres and it’s a big hit, that would get the religious right’s attention.

  8. Actually, I thought it was clear at the very end of the tale that the story was about the redemption of Cassidy, and that Jesse had pitched the whole “hunt down the Lord” bit as a vehicle for this (which was the real twist at the end in the final scene with Cassidy). The actual end of the story, with the St of Killers assuming the Throne, seemed incidental to the story of friendship and betrayal and redemption that defined Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy as a group. But that was just how I read it.

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