Five Insane Preacher Comic Moments We Can’t Wait to See on TV

Now, look, there’s a problem here.

Preacher, the comic from Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon and Vertigo, is a great example of something that conventional wisdom holds you cannot adapt to television.

Leaving aside the sex and the violence, there’s a lot of high-concept crazy that’s just begging to be done so poorly the whole thing falls apart…and of course there’s the well-meaning blasphemy that pervades the whole endeavor, ensuring that the project will become the target of protests before it ever hits the air.

But as AMC has picked up the series and the network has pushed the envelope before with The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad and the like, it seemed worth exploring some of the crazy s–t that made Preacher what it was, and that we’d like to see on TV.

Whether it will, of course, is a whole other conversation…

That opening

  

This one seems like the most likely thing to stay, since it would be difficult to do without…but when you get to talking about how people are likely to protest or boycott the show over concerns about its treatment of religion…well, it starts almost immediately.

While giving a sermon at his church at the start of the series, Jesse Custer is possessed of the Genesis, a being with the powers of God, which inadvertently kills everyone there. The place burns down as he makes his addle-minded escape.

…Which is the kind of sequence that’s all well and good until you start thinking about actually airing it, and what happens when people see a church in flames on their TV. Remember: AMC is the network that got not a small amount of hate mail for the “Four Walls and a Roof” episode of The Walking Dead on behalf of people who felt it was disrespectful for Rick and company to kill a group of cannibals in self-defense because they did so in a church.

That said? It’s a tremendously effective scene, and establishes the stakes right away. It’s hard to imagine how else they would get the audience into the world of the series as quickly.

The meat doll

  

Elizabeth Perkins has been cast as Vyla Quincannon, a character who may be either related to, or a gender-swapped replacement for, Odin Quincannon.

In the comics, the hateful, racist slaughterhouse owner is arguably the most repulsive character in a series full of them…and the moment that defines him for many fans is when it was revealed that he has a sex doll made entirely from meat handled at the slaughterhouse.

(Well, that and a wig.)

There isn’t any big, far-reaching story reason for the doll, which serves basically just for shock value and to give the readers another reason to hate Quincannon. Whether it will turn up in the show or not is hard to say, although it could always be alluded to when Vyla says something about how she came into possession of Odin’s factory.

Cassidy and the women

  

Cassidy’s most notorious exploit in the series is that he takes advantage of Tulip when she believes Jesse to be dead.

By which we mean, he keeps her essentially doped up with drugs and alcohol and carries on an unhealthy “relationship” with her which he knows she wouldn’t consent to if she were sober and not in shock.

Some version of that storyline will likely appear in the show, if they get that far, since it’s so key to the development of Cassidy’s character and the relationship between the three as they play out in the end of the series.

That said, it wouldn’t be shocking to leave Jesse’s checkered past — that he’s been horribly physically abusive to a number of his exes, which was explained in graphic detail in the comics — into the TV show.

Cass is kind of a lovable scoundrel for the first bit of the series, and gets more despicable as things go on. That’s likely going to be his overall trajectory, but it’s hard to picture them making their “lovable scoundrel” into a true bastard, especially when you see the way they handled the abusive racist Merle Dixon on The Walking Dead once he and Daryl developed a following.

Wait…was that Bill Hicks?!

  

There are SO MANY choices for this kind of thing.

Preacher is a book full of dismemberment, abuse, sex, drugs, death, religion…there are a number of larger-than-life, pump-your-fist moments that are also barely publishable, let alone something that you could do on a TV show.

But for me, a defining moment of the series and one that changed how I viewed the series, was when Jesse sat down at a bar in the ’90s and ended up inadvertently sharing a drink with Bill Hicks, the stand-up comedian.

Hicks’ work, which you can see a tiny bit of in the comic, is an obvious influence for somebody like Ennis when you really think about it, and his inclusion — especially the way it was done — was both awesome and touching.

Of course, this will never make it to TV. Besides the fact that Hicks’ likeness rights and the rights to his comedy are likely tied up somewhere with the oft-rumored biopic that’s supposed to be in development, there’s the fact that his inclusion would tie Preacher to the ’90s — Hicks died in 1994 — probably not something that the show necessarily wants to do.

God is dead

  

While this is probably a major spoiler for anybody who hasn’t read the comics, if you’ve come this far without jumping ship you’re kind of asking for it.

So, yeah, in Preacher #66, Saint of Killer shoots up Heaven and ultimately kills God for his crimes throughout the series.

Actually, physically depicting God will be dicey enough on a TV show, but killing him? And not in a way that’s particularly thoughtful of respectful, but out of anger and bitterness and for something that’s GOD’s FAULT?

It’s a great moment, it’s a crazy moment, and it felt like the only way to end Preacher…but will they really do that on television?

I guess we’ll have a few years to figure it out, anyway.