It's still hard to believe that Garth Ennis' scurrilous Vertigo graphic novel series, Preacher, is heading to a mainstream TV channel in the hands of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Dominic Cooper stars as the Reverend Jesse Custer, with Ruth Negga as his ass-kicking girlfriend Tulip, Joseph Gilgun as amoral Irish vampire Cassidy, Ian Colletti as the "unfortunate" Arseface, and Elizabeth Perkins as the scheming Vyla Quinncannon. And if you still can't wrap your head around it, AMC have just released the first trailer to prove it's true.
Preacher, if you're unaware, is an extremely violent and extremely funny 75-issue comics odyssey following the aforementioned Reverend Custer (who, possessed by the godlike offspring of an angel and a demon, has some rather special abilities) and company on the trail of God, who has gone missing. Side-plots along the way involve the keepers of Christ's bloodline (in the form of a "special" inbred boy whose vocabulary consists solely of the word "humperdido"); meat fetishists; military fascists; necromantics; nuclear weapons; John Wayne; and Bill Hicks. And that's isn't the half of it.
Quite how much of that will make its way to television remains to be seen. Our immediate reaction to the trailer: the comics' Cassidy never takes off his sunglasses!
Nevertheless, "We love most of the main cornerstones of the comic," Rogen has explained, "but we’re trying to make it that even if you’ve read the comic you should not know exactly what to expect from the TV show. We’ve come up with a lot of incredibly crazy ideas. It’s a fun thing to riff on and talk about..."
Rogen and Goldberg are directing; Breaking Bad veteran Sam Catlin wrote the screenplay; and assuming the pilot has already won a series order, and Preacher should debut on AMC in mid-2016.