TV Review: Preacher - The Final Season

TV Review: Preacher – The Final Season

September 27th 2019, 1:00pm

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Synopsis: It all comes down to this: Jesse, Cassidy, and Tulip have a final confrontation with The Grail and God himself as their quest comes to a conclusion. Oh, and find out what happens to Arseface, The Saint of Killers, and Hitler in a disgusting and perverse journey through the Holy Land.

Review: After four seasons, AMC's Preacher is coming to an end. The sacreligious epic about a man of the cloth trying to kill God has never quite built up the following the source material deserved and failed to make anything close to a dent in the ratings like fellow comic book series The Walking Dead. But, the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg created show is going out on their own terms with a season that brings everything to a head and wraps up the story of Jesse Custer as best it could. This final season of Preacher will not do anything to convert those put off by this spin on the near-perfect comic book by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, but it may be the most fun run the show has put on screen.

With lackluster reviews and ratings over it's four year run, it came as a surprise to no one that AMC gave this sacreligious series an end date. But, with ten episode seasons, Preacher had a lot of storylines that were pushed aside in favor of changes to the narrative, many for the worse. In the final season, the showrunners and writers try to cram in a bunch of subplots from the comics including the De Sade sequence, Masada, and Arseface's rock and roll career. None of these elements really were given their due and are rushed in favor of a lot of time with Herr Starr, Hitler, Jesus, and God himself. Despite the story gaining some momentum in the middle, I am disappointed to say the finale fails to redeem itself.

Without giving any spoilers away, the main storyline of Jesse Custer's quest to find God is completed and yet it feels incredibly anticlimactic. The entire finale fails to really do anything special which makes it all the more disappointing that they didn't keep the comic book ending. Fans of the comic will feel especially cheated by the way the fates of Jesse, Tulip, and Cassidy are handled. The only characters who seem to have earned their fates in this series are The Saint of Killers and Jesus Christ with everyone else clearly given a tidy close to their arcs due to the limited episode count this season.

I was happy to see a lot of callbacks and easter eggs for comic book fans peppered through this season and the series finale is no exception. But, it is just too little too late as this show spent two seasons on stories that lasted mere issues in the comic book and crammed at least half of the graphic novels into a couple of episodes this season. Taken by itself, Preacher is a fun show and one that I can see the uninitiated having fun with, but for those of us who spent years following the comics, this final season is a suckerpunch right in the dick. Even when a small reference is made to John Wayne, it felt more like a throwaway than the significant element from the comic book that it actually is.

I stand by all of the casting choices for this show, especially Pip Torrens as Herr Starr and Joseph Gilgun as Cassidy, both of whom nail their counterparts. Even the chemistry between Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga sells the romance of Jesse and Tulip, but the problem is there is so much time focused on characters like Jesus Christ (a great Tyson Ritter) and Hitler (Noah Taylor) that characters like Arseface are given short shrift. The lone improvement here over the comic is Mark Harelik as God who is a far more interesting character than in the comic.

What we ultimately get with the full series is a show that failed to capitalize fully on the source material. The first season was essentially wasted by stretching a short arc into three times as many episodes as necessary. While I absolutely loved the casting choices for the main characters as well as Starr and God, there are so many elements missing from the comic book that this series never truly felt like Preacher at all. Had Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Sam Catlin elected to call this series by a different name it may have been a modest hit or a cult classic. Instead, AMC's Preacher is a series that just shares a title with an iconic comic book. This is not the Preacher we deserved.

The series finale of Preacher airs Sunday, September 29th on AMC.