George Dunn

We watched the entire run of 'Preacher'. At the outset it came across as a quirky and imaginative concept and we eagerly awaited the release of the second series. In the meantime I made it my business to read all of the original Graphic Novels by Garth Ennis. They were incredible. The original story of 'Preacher' as told in the Comics is nothing short of a masterpiece. They take you on an extraordinary journey through awesome narrative themes and totally beleivable character progressions. The pace and pathos is perfectly delivered and by the end of them I literally felt like a better version of myself. It was then slightly perturbing to realise that virtually the entire second season was a complete departure from the books which ultimately proved to be completely unnecessary. It continued to be entertaining enough, and we followed its' progress, albeit somewhat painstakingly through the second and third series as the storyline of the TV adaptation strained to reconcile themes from the much loved original source material with its' own slightly irrelevant narrative tangents. It had however become apparent by the end of the third season that it was already too late for this TV adaptation to be 'good'. By the fourth season, 'Preacher' had already been cancelled and after three seasons'worth of extrapolating tenuous and completely irrelevant plot lines, all remaining storytelling necessarily suddenly needed to be crammed into this final run of episodes. Consequently all of the pathos and drama that once might have been was entirely skipped over in favour of an absurdly careless botch-job of sloppy sensationalism and cheap gags. By the conclusion of the fourth and final series, the overall impression was that of an impudent toddler literally throwing all of its' toys out of the pram. For some puzzling reason best known unto themselves, the creators of this TV series saw fit to take one of the best stories to have been told in recent times and completely defame it. In its' place they apparently decided to tell a different story which starts off being 'not particularly good' and ends up totally puerile. It is a sad thing indeed that somebody could not have just told the story that already existed instead of trying to rebuild it in their own image. Perhaps the most fundamentally puzzling inconsistency of this re-imagining is the fact that none of the main characters even vaguely resemble their equivalent characters from the books, and as a result, all of their interpersonal dynamics are completely skewed and there is effectively not much point to any of them. Maybe one day there will be a good TV adaptation of 'Preacher', I will look forward to this. In the meantime I hope to acquire the 'Ultimate' leather-bound editions of the original comics in order that I can re-read them and exorcise the nonsense of this rather thin offering...

I just tried to get into this a couple of times in as many days and it hasn't grabbed me. It is very rich to look at, but just has the distinct feeling of being one of those slightly heavy-handed TV dramas which always seem to be stating the obvious and taking rather a long time to do so. Not so long ago something like this would have blown everybody away but there are so many very good things out there nowadays that for me, personally, if a TV series can't fairly quickly demonstrate a snappier script and/or more engaging plot-line than this, I find myself beginning to feel quite daunted by the prospect of committing to many hours of it...