Back in February we got the official word that AMC and Sony Pictures Television had closed a deal to develop Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s 1990s comic book, PREACHER, into a dramatic series. Tackling writing duties for the adaptation are none other than Seth Rogen and his partner Evan Goldberg who look to keep the series true to the comic.
Collider recently caught up with Goldberg who shed some additional details on the series that should make fans of the comic pretty happy. Goldberg tells the site, “We just had a meeting with AMC and Garth Ennis, who’s the writer, and we all kind of seemed to agree that we’re gonna stay as true to the comic as we can. We need to change some stuff but we’re not gonna change much, I hope. We’re just gonna do a little more of the preamble instead of doing flashbacks and restructure how we dole out the information a little, but we’re gonna [do the] same characters, same story, same ending. We’re gonna try to stick to Preacher as best we can. We’re making it with Sam Catlin who did Breaking Bad, and so he might tell me I’m wrong about all of this and that the real way to do it is different because he’s much smarter and better at all this than I am. But we’re gonna try to stick to what it is as best we can.” Adapting a comic to the screen is certainly no easy task—especially one as popular as PREACHER—so all you can hope for is that they stick as close to the source material as they can while telling the story that made the comics so popular in the first place; and it sounds like they are doing exactly that.
“We’re beyond excited, we’ve tried to make it for 10 years. The big difference is everyone else tried to make it a movie and it shouldn’t be a movie. It should be an AMC show, that’s the proper way for it to get done… It’s too big; you can’t do that in a movie. It’s just too big. You’ve gotta learn the characters, it’s all about a love triangle and you need to grow with them and see the woman swayed one way or the other, and in a movie you just can’t accomplish all that.” I couldn’t agree more with what he says there. TV is an entirely different beast than film because it allows the writers more than enough wiggle room to get the story right. So whether you’re a fan of what AMC did with “The Walking Dead” or not, there’s no denying that they have opened up the doors for stuff like “Preacher” to finally get made. And for that, AMC is pretty badass if you ask me.
That’s it for now, folks, but hopefully we’ll be hearing plenty more from this one soon!