Comic book shows on TV are generally takes from superheroic source material, but many other corners of the comic world thankfully get the attention they deserve. AMC, hoping to create the same kind of success it found with adapting The Walking Dead, will soon bring Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s spiritually supernatural Preacher to live-action for the first time. As you might have imagined and possibly dreaded, the TV show will be quite different from the hyper-blasphemous and violent books, but everyone involved believes it’ll make everyone happy anyway.
Creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, along with showrunner Sam Catlin, were at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in promotion of Preacher, and Rogen let people know the reality of the situation, according to EW.
I don’t know that you could translate it directly. Everybody involved felt we should not – including [comic creator Garth Ennis].
Anyone who has read the comics knows there are a ton of moments and details that would be really hard to bring to cable television, and even though lots of them are the exact moments that we’d want to see in the first place, compromises have to be made. (The same thing has happened to Lucifer over on Fox.) We know that Dominic Cooper’s Jesse Custer will indeed be on a deadly mission to find God, with the help of Ruth Negga’s Tulip and Joe Gilgun’s Cassidy, but there will likely be an excision of religious aspects, along with some of the more disgusting elements, as well as the cursing. I still hope his lighter says “Fuck Communism,” even if it has to get blurred out. Maybe.
Even though creators usually do give their approval to adaptations and are able to accept each piece of media for what it is, Garth Ennis’ success and respect within the business make his blessing worth more. Evan Goldberg explained things a little more, according to SlashFilm.
We talked with Garth and Garth very much encouraged us to make a lot of small changes and make it a good show first and foremost. We want fans to get everything they loved about the comic and still get some twists and turns.
Perhaps like The Walking Dead does, we’ll see new things added to the story, with some other elements and characters combined and streamlined. The first trailer already got me pumped up enough to not necessarily care right away about what I won’t be getting to see, since there’s so much that we will get to see. Plus, the three of them promise that the show will be full of Easter eggs for comic fans to notice, and that the violence will be coupled with comedy the whole way through.
Could Preacher become one of the most-watched comic book shows of 2016 even without specifically porting the comic events over to the small screen? Find out when it debuts its 10-episode Season 1 on AMC at some point later this year.
