Preacher Season 2 Reviewed

Pulpit Fiction

♦ Tripwire’s senior editor ANDREW COLMAN reviews the second season of AMC’s Preacher, which finished this week…

Preacher
Producers:, Sam Catlin, Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen
Stars: Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga, Joseph Gilgun

The showrunners in charge of Preacher promised a second series that would adhere far more to the road trip aspect of the original comic, after the first season spent its entire run within the confines of the benighted town of Annville. And indeed, the series certainly draws most of its plotlines from Ennis and Dillon’s magnum opus. The trouble is, the producers didn’t know when to stop.

Our protagonists, Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), the preacher literally searching for God, Tulip O’ Hare (Ruth Negga) his battle-hardened girlfriend, and Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun), a blokey Irish vampire specializing in meandering aimlessness, are the three amigos on a mission which rarely comes into focus, but is always at least moderately diverting. After learning from one of the angels, Fiore (Tom Brooke) that he has contracted the Saint of Killers (Graham McTavish) to kill him, Custer concludes for whatever reason that his search for the deity should centre on New Orleans. Which is where the action stays for the rest of the episodes, oddly enough.

After Jesse’s thorough yet fruitless search of every dive in the Big Easy, the plots continue to thicken – there’s a man in a dog costume who Jesse believes might be the Lord, and there’s also a bar singer who turns out to be an operative for a sinister global cabal that monitors all paranormal activity, not to mention Tulip’s ex-husband’s hired goons are looking for her cause she was naughty. And the Saint of Killers, loveable force of nature that he is, is relentlessly hoving into view, thanks to Custer’s use of Genesis (the word of God). The three feckless leads are certainly wanted by a whole host of Fellini-esque weirdos and whackjobs, and yet they refuse to leave their grimy New Orleans dung heap, preferring instead to remain sitting ducks.

And yet there’s still more – we have poor old Arseface’s (Ian Colletti) arc, condemned as he is to an eternity in hell thanks to Custer. He doesn’t intersect with the main event, his progress throughout each chapter a rather drawn-out escape from the netherworld, aided (in somewhat questionable taste, although taste is not what this series aspires to) by another inmate, Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor). Cassidy’s subplot, for what it’s worth, concerns his aged son Denis (Ronald Guttman), who is rescued from imminent death by becoming a vampire himself, consequently turning into a ghastly, psychotic burden for the relatively mild-mannered Irishman. And finally there’s Custer himself, haunted intermittently by the ghosts of Southern Gothic ghouls who murdered his dad and terrorized his childhood.

Needless to say, there are a lot of new characters that make their entrances in this series – perhaps the best, or certainly the most humorous of them, is Herr Starr (Pip Torrens), the high commander working on behalf of that aforementioned shadowy network (The Grail). A supremely languid if cartoonish villain in the Donald Pleasance mode, Starr has his devoted minions Lara Featherstone (Julie Ann Emery) and Hoover (Malcolm Barrett) both spy on and even befriend Custer and his chums.

The trouble is (yes, I was getting to that) is that despite the series’ efforts to remain at least reasonably loyal to the source material, nothing really gels. By shoehorning virtually all the plot and exposition from seventy-five comics into thirteen programs, we end up with a show that has plenty to offer but barely any time to develop subtext or direction. Arseface’s tenure in hell (a concrete grey cell block) is done with some panache, resembling as it does a Sartre-esque nightmare, but he’s there for too long. Conversely, Custer’s gruesome formative years (one of the key parts of the comic series, and certainly the most powerful) is barely touched upon, yet it should’ve been centre stage. For far too much of the series, Tulip and Cassidy hang around their bohemian pit discussing what to do next, occasionally getting brutally attacked when a malefactor turns up.

The circularity of the supporting leads’ narrative isn’t helped by the odd way that Starr and Custer join forces, with the former convinced that the latter is the messiah – a wilful divergence from the comic. With Custer off on his travels, manipulated by Starr into helping him on his mission, the other two are left to slowly figure out what is going on. We occasionally experience their inner dialogue, and we certainly warm to them as characters, but there is no identification or concern with them – with such a breakneck turnover of nemeses and antagonists, it’s hard to care all that much regarding what happens to the three principals.

Not that this series is anything less than entertaining, and at times, amusing. Custer’s ingenious methods of solving an impossibly problematic situation, such as when he has to find a soul for the Saint of Killers within an hour, are captivating, as is Torrens’s turn as the casually ruthless super-villain. Yet, the irony and sledgehammer wit of the comic is still missing from the proceedings – there are moments, of course, such as when Harry Connick Jr’s house gets destroyed by a missile meant for Custer. And the interplay between Starr and his underlings is always caustically funny. However it is the lack of a strong central dramatic thread, coupled with a need to raid Ennis and Dillon’s canon, which sees the show fall between two stools. It plays, but doesn’t have any of the qualities that underpin a true cult classic – its lack of conviction means that it is a pleasantly off-kilter diversion but little more, despite the decent script and mostly excellent performances. Another series is on the cards, but like the Saint of Killers, the project needs to find its soul.

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