Genre: TV Pilot – Drama/Supernatural
Premise: An alcoholic preacher in a small West Texas town becomes the true voice of God.
About: Preacher was originally a comic book series created by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon. Recently, Seth Rogan’s team snatched up the rights to turn the series into a TV show for AMC. It looks like Rogen’s producing partner Evan Goldberg is directing the pilot. And Sam Caitlin (Breaking Bad) wrote the pilot. This is Rogen and Goldberg’s favorite comic ever and they consider it a huge blessing to be able to bring the project to life.
Writer: Sam Caitlin
Details: 60 pages (undated)
You look at this bold new TV dominated entertainment universe and wonder why it’s taken so long to put something like Preacher onscreen. It’s a stylistic smorgasbord of wild characters and deep mythology that has “hit” written all over it. It’s no coincidence that AMC is very high on this. And of all the big TV announcements, this one seems to be the most talked about.
So will it be a hit?
If I had to take a guess, I’d say that Preacher, more than any other project coming out this year, has the chance to become a breakout phenomenon. That means this pilot script must be really good, right? Well, that’s where some debate may be in order. This is definitely a well-written pilot. Sam Caitlin, who wrote 10 episodes of Breaking Bad, knows what he’s doing. But this script is also a bit overwhelming. I’d never heard of the Preacher universe before this teleplay and now that I have, I wish someone would’ve given me some warning ahead of time.
The script follows a small-town Texas preacher named Jesse Custer. Jesse starts his sermons off with his best friends Jim Beam and Jack Daniels, and usually ends them that way too. Unfortunately the old saying, “You get what you project” is on full display. You’d be lucky to find even one person paying attention to what Jesse has to say.
But Jesse’s a good guy. He cares about people and wants to help the community. But just like all of us who want to better our lives and the way we exist within them, he can’t seem to find the motivation to actually do it. It’s so much easier to open another beer, to pour another drink.
Jesse’s past might help explain this. Before being a preacher, Jesse travelled the world as some sort of crime enforcer black ops specialist. To be honest, I don’t know what he did but it’s clear it involved lots of illegalities and violence. He was the exact opposite of a preacher.
This story isn’t only about Jesse though. We meet a hedge-fund billionaire named Cassidy who also happens to be a vampire. We meet Jesse’s old partner in crime, Tulip, who spends her days building homemade bazookas and using them to shoot down Blackhawk helicopters. We take visits to the Himalayas and Uganda, where we meet people bursting into goo. And let’s not forget the requirement of any good show – a disfigured teenager who can’t stop drooling all over himself. And they thought giving Walter White’s son cerebral palsy was going to be a risk.
As all of these things start to descend in on Jesse in one way or another, Jesse’s life is turned upside-down by a gaggle of sparrows who shoot down into his throat. These sparrows happen to be the voice of God, which Jesse now possesses. Finally, all the doubts fade away, and Jesse becomes the man he’s always wanted to be. But Jesse has no idea just how intense his new power really is.
Let’s start off by putting our producer hats on. If I worked at a television network, I would put Preacher on my slate in a second. Like AMC has stated, this show is visual, it’s outrageous, it’s got characters you’d have to have a lobotomy to forget. This is something where if it all pays off, we could be looking at a show that rivals Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead.
But it still has to pay off. And I’m not completely sold on if it will.
As much as I enjoyed the outrageousness of it all, let’s strip away all the bells and whistle, all the “style over substance” and get into what’s really going on in Preacher. What’s really going on is absurdity. We’re jumping to Uganda where men are bursting into goop. We’re watching women kill men by jamming full cobs of corn down their throat. There’s a battle on a plane with crossbows.
Fun, right?
But… none of it moves me. It doesn’t pull me into the story or the people inside of that story.
When Preacher is at its best is during its simplest scenes when we’re with Jesse trying to find some sort of beacon to guide his life. My favorite subplot of the pilot is Jesse confronting the man who’s abusing his wife and child. It gets to the heart of Jesse’s issue. Jesse is a trained killer. He could turn this man into maggot food within 3 seconds. But he’s chosen this new peace-preaching lifestyle and he wants to stay true to that. So when this man is beating the shit out of him, we’re right there on the edge of our seats going, “What is he going to do?” Part of us wants him to tear the man apart. The other wants him to be the good man of God that he’s trying to be.
That’s when you know a script is really working. When it’s pulling at the reader like that.
Unfortunately, that’s only a small part of this pilot. The rest of it is, like I said, lots of jumping around to these crazy characters engaged in crazy violent things.
I’m going to make a pretty big proclamation here. But it’s something I stand by after reading a lot of these pilots. When you’re going supernatural with your series. Or you’re writing a universe that’s really crazy. Don’t jump into the craziness right away. You have 75 episodes to do that. Focus instead on your hero – give us someone to care about – someone who’s unique and challenging and deep (like Jesse) and make the pilot just about him.
Then, either through your ending or maybe a couple of carefully placed clips, HINT at the chaos to come. HINT at the supernatural aspects to come. I always love when a fairly straightforward pilot ends with some supernatural cliffhanger. That’s the kind of thing that brings people back for week 2.
Because, in the end, TV is about character. Not how cool or crazy you can make a character. But giving us characters that we can relate to on some level (at least initially) so that we have somebody to root for. When we jump to Cassidy the Hedge Fund vampire, it was a cool scene but it was too much for me. My brain couldn’t handle it. But had that happened on episode 2 or 3? Once the universe had been established? There it might’ve worked.
This is a classic dilemma all writers face when they’re writing TV pilots with extensive mythologies. They want to prove how awesome and deep their mythology is right away so they throw all these wild crazy weird scenes into their pilot. But if you don’t hook the reader on an emotional level (Walter White needing to provide for his family before he dies of cancer) because you’re too busy showing off, you might lose that opportunity.
That’s the reason I didn’t love this pilot. As much as I appreciated the wide-ranging level of detail involved, at the end of the day, I just wanted to connect with someone and root for them. Preacher has some amazing upside and I hope the pilot does focus more on connecting the audience with its characters in the future. Because if it does, this could be the post-Walking-Dead network saving show that AMC has been hoping for.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s a lot of material out there that has been deemed by Hollywood over the last 30 years or so to be too complicated or elaborate to be translated into a movie. Preacher would probably fall into that category. But with the recent revolution of television, particularly the big budgets being spent on shows, that same material is now prime real estate to be adapted into a TV show. So don’t be afraid to go back through all that material of the past 30 years and look for stuff that would be perfect for a long form translation. There are literally MILLIONS of books and comics out there so it shouldn’t be hard to find something.
