What Has Gone Before kept going

Hm? Wha-? Was I supposed to be awake there?

I'm a "book reader" when it comes to Game of Thrones, as opposed to a "show watcher", which means that I read the novels before the show began; since 1996, in fact. So the vast majority of what occurred in the seasons leading up to the current one (season 6) was replay for me: I knew what was going to happen but it was enjoyable simply to see it played out onscreen and by an excellent cast. Sometimes it really is cooler to see dragons than it is to imagine them. In a similar vein, I read the entire run of Preacher, month by month, in the 90s, so you'd think that I'd have a similar reaction to the TV show. I'd be able to anticipate what was coming and be excited, even if I knew how it would turn out.

But four episodes into the first season, I don't really have much to look forward to because we're really not getting anywhere. We've seen mildly weird stuff, but nothing anywhere near the extremes that the comic series approached. We've seen a little bit of character development, but nothing that makes any of the characters particularly gripping. Meanwhile, most of the cast is still kind of running in place and the story is stuck with them.

Hey. Hey! You're not paying attention.

On the positive side, we have Jesse deciding that he's going to use The Voice for something positive: getting people to serve God. Specifically, he's getting Odin Quincannon, local industrial and real estate overlord, to do so. But that means... what? The most we've seen of Quincannon so far is that he likes snuff films, is willing to pay people so that he can bulldoze their houses, and gives rather short and direct eulogies for people that die on his land. None of that adds up to anything particularly dramatic when he suddenly finds a reason to listen to the song of the Lord. It's not the equivalent of Cersei suddenly giving away all of her money to the poor of Kings' Landing and becoming a Silent Sister, simply because we don't know enough about Quincannon for it to have that kind of impact.

Similarly. the funeral of Lacey shows Tulip getting pissed about how casually both her demise and the consequent corpse are treated. Great. Tulip can get angry. But we've known that since episode one when she killed two guys in a speeding car over some meth. Tulip is supposed to be a major character in this story, but her participation in this episode was a couple minutes of indignant rage about everyone else's passivity. Shouldn't there have been something else there? The entire episode seemed to be character setup that was already established. It's like the background that editors tell you not to include when you're making a pitch for a fantasy novel: if the exciting stuff is in the past, then why do we care about your story now?

I know there was an interesting story in here somewhere.

Likewise, Cassidy continues the role of clown and occasional scheming addict, but that turned out to be OK. At least he's contributing something by running a con on the angels (Yes. They're not bounty hunters. We'll just call them angels since they've at least revealed that they come from the land in the clouds.), which are the two characters that actually most moved the overall (and current!) series plot forward this time, since they've come close to admitting just what it is they're pursuing and why it seems to require Jesse's vivisection. If there's any reason that a casual observer just coming across the show would stay and watch, it's the comedy of errors that is that trio while Cassidy attempts to score with their cash, and the fact that they retain some degree of mystery while they ineptly attempt to be mysterious.

Y'all are idiots for abandoning God. And sitting here this long.

But all of this surrounds the central plot of the episode, which is Jesse trying to be a man of God and fill the church by holding a raffle. Once again, we seem to have a writing team that wants to play in a Tales from the Crypt-esque world but doesn't quite know how to pull it off while still saying something "profound" about Jesse's motivations. The flashbacks to his childhood, his father's expectations, the incredibly restrained whipping, and Jesse's general disenchantment with religious life are obvious attempts to display the experiences (what has gone before...) that would make Jesse the kind of metronome of morality that he seems to be (hardcore crook to minister who still isn't above beating the shit out of people in bars and manipulating the emotions of his assistant for a big screen TV.) But none of that made for particularly gripping television, either, as it seemed to stumble away from the weird stuff while trying to say something larger. This is, in truth, the problem that I eventually had with the comic series, but Garth Ennis was a hell of a lot better at it. I stayed with that for 66 issues and over five years. I may not last three months with the show unless they can give me a better reason to pay attention than watching Cassidy toy with the minions of Heaven.

So, now we're arcing toward annoying

I've run into a few people over the years who felt that Breaking Bad started slowly. My typical response has been: "Are you kidding me? It opens with a guy in a gas mask and his tighty-whities, driving an RV at high speed across the New Mexico desert, with two corpses sliding around in the back. How can you open much faster than that?" But what they're usually referring to is the few episodes after that where we find out about Walt's dead end career as a chemistry teacher and his cancer and his somewhat shrewish wife and all the other dolorous things that make his escape from that life into the role of Heisenberg so obviously enticing. There was a change of pace, but I was so interested in the performances of Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul at that point that I didn't really care. This was a story and I wanted to know more about it. But that story was about Walt and there was enough depth there to build on, even if most people think it took a few episodes to really get up and moving. Preacher is supposed to be the story of Jesse and The Word. However, there are a number of other stories happening at the same time (Tulip, Cassidy, Arseface) and it looks like the showrunners are having a hard time figuring out how to introduce all of it in some kind of sequential fashion, so we're getting a sine wave of pacing that makes all of it seem somewhat irrelevant.

Let's take Tulip's encounter with the cop. It lasted a few minutes and told us... what? That Tulip's a veteran? Maybe. The ring could just be a highway dodge. That she's really interested in "saving her man"? Maybe. That's a nice story to tell someone when you've been hauled down for doing 60 over the limit. That she's convincing enough to sell a state trooper a line of bullshit? Yeah. I think we know that already, so why are we visiting it again in episode 3? What purpose does it serve in the long-term, either for Tulip's character or the story as a whole? What purpose does it serve for the story you're telling in this episode tonight? (I'm reminded again of Jim Shooter's famous dictum: Every comic is someone's first. They all have to have a beginning, middle, and end in each issue.) There just doesn't seem to be much there.

Similarly, Sheriff Root suddenly becoming Sheriff Ed Tom Bell doesn't do a whole lot for me. Root was one of the more detestable characters of the comic series, not a guy you'd sympathize with because the world had gotten too crazy. He provided a focus for the animus of the readers toward the situations that were afflicting Jesse and Co. (not least to his son, Arseface.) In other words, he made a solid bad guy. And perhaps that's the real problem here to begin with.

We seemed to have a bad guy in Sheriff Root, but now he's just lost control of his world and seems more plaintive than like someone trying to reassert control. We seemed to have bad guys in the two hunters from heaven but they had a nice sitdown with the sheriff and now we know they're basically just trying to do the right thing (as they describe it, anyway.) There's still the lurking presence of a bad guy in the still-unnamed Odin Quincannon, but the audience hasn't been shown enough of him to really make that determination, especially since he's had all of a half-dozen total lines in three episodes. What we have is a bunch of people who are some shade of gray, rather than black or white, and I normally love that. I'm perfectly fine with the characters not being divided into white hats and black hats. Honestly, I prefer it. The problem here is that they're all the same shade of gray, which makes it hard to determine why any of them are interesting at all, since everyone seems to be just one big, confused but happy family at this point. Perhaps once they finish stumbling into each other and apologizing, we'll finally get someone who becomes annoyed and picks a fight; conflict being kind of essential to any decent story.

One would think that the showrunners are aware of the massive potential for conflict inherent to Cassidy. But so far, the latter has been reduced to comic relief (I did appreciate the appearance of the sun-blocking paddy hat, since that was a hallmark of the character in the comics. The production's eye for detail is definitely apparent.) and little else. There isn't even really a foundation for the level of affection that exists between him and Jesse, since all we've really had on camera is a couple minutes of them drinking and Jesse trying to get Cassidy to go all "exposition dump" on us. Why would Jesse have taken in this strange guy, other than being a preacher and trying to accept everyone as a child of the Lord, yadda yadda yadda? I guess that's a foundation, but Jesse doesn't strike me as mentally strong enough to take that position just yet, especially since he's wandering around as confused as the rest of the cast, if not moreso because he's still doesn't understand the presence of The Word.

I'm not burying it yet. I liked some of the technique employed by director, Scott Winant. Quincannon walking from the theater into the light was a very comic-like splash page effect. And the flashback scenes to Tulip, Jesse, and the now-absent Carlos were well done, giving both a dramatic turn to an episode that lacked it and a nice flash of the roots of their relationship. But I'm not watching Preacher for directorial technique and I'll go ahead and assume that over 99% of the rest of the audience isn't, either. There has to be something for me to want to come back to and Jesse using The Word to make Cassidy dance and throw himself into walls really isn't it. Tellingly, while watching the latest episode, I was actually dozing off, which was unusual not just because it was the middle of the afternoon, but also because, as most people will tell you, I don't sleep that much. There has to be something soon that makes me sit up and take interest, because The Word clearly isn't getting through to me.

Spiritual slump

Today's musical interlude is descriptive, but not determinative. In other words, despite what follows, don't lose all hope yet.

Ongoing series will often run into the problem of the sophomore slump, in that their second season will often be much less interesting than their first, either because their writers have gone down too many bad trails or because they blew their wad in the first season and weren't quite ready for the follow-up. Of course, normally that takes an entire season. After having seen the second episode of Preacher, I'm mildly concerned that writer Sam Catlin and directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are having premature... troubles.

Two weeks ago when I wrote about the pilot, I mentioned that I thought the elements of the story that more closely resembled something like Carnivale were the ones that I could really see working for the series. Part of that is the willingness for the writer and director(s) to say: "This is our world and welcome to it." In other words, you can't play up the fact that weirdness is happening. It simply is what happens, similar to a Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That involves all elements of the production, from sets to score. Too much of this second episode spent time emphasizing just how "weird" these events were supposed to be. The most obvious point was when Jesse stops in the road to investigate the baby seat before Tulip effectively kidnaps him. At that point, the screeching violins were telling you that "THIS WAS A MOMENT OF CRISIS AND YOU SHOULD FEEL CRISIS"/Zoidberg. Why? Do we need to be told that this is a tense moment? The lack of lighting and the fact that a baby seat is in the road should tell us that (although it was kind of tough to tell what it was; a direct shot with the camera might have been better than having Jesse and Tulip tell us later.) That was a director saying: "This isn't WEIRD enough. Hit the strings!" That's not someone who's sure of his story or his setting.

Similarly, we spent a lot of time doing obvious establishment shots like the one of the bounty hunters up there (I'm trying so hard to not spoil stuff...) Even more prominent was Jesse meeting Cassidy back at the church before the whole "origin story" drinking session. That was basically the director(s) saying: "Here's the home turf of our hero, where he feels most comfortable, and where you should feel at home while we take another long look at the run down building that represents the complicated faith of our hero and his flock." But we get that already. We don't need to keep being reminded of it. And, also, what gives with the whole "So, what's your story, Cassidy?" That's a direct quote. Two guys are drinking and you can't come up with a subtler way of getting into Cassidy's past than simply asking for it. You're not telling a story there. You're reading from a pitch. Give me a story.

I still like some of the details. The hunters using dark steampunk tech is good; very Gilliam-esque. Cassidy slurping blood off the floor is a measure of what he is in more ways than one (vampire and addict.) But, by the same token, I'm also a little distressed at the lack of some detail. This is out in the sticks of west Texas (which is pretty much all of west Texas...), right? Then why is it that the outside of the church looks like a meticulously groomed movie set? There's no dirt other than what's been perfectly raked and smoothed. There's no debris, natural or otherwise. There's nothing that indicates that people actually, y'know, live here. This is a problem (among many) that the Constantine TV series had. John Constantine is supposed to be someone from the underbelly of society, but every time he appeared on camera, his clothes looked like he'd just walked out of a dry cleaner. Similarly, Jesse and Cassidy are supposed to be fairly lowdown guys, but you can't convince me that these guys are salt-of-the-earth if there ain't no earth.

Once again, the person that seems to have most embraced his or her role is the her. Despite Tulip being given the fairly boilerplate tough girl activities (beating the guys at poker, etc.), there's enough mystery in what she's doing for us to at least be willing to follow her around. She also seems to have the most complex motivations, which means that she's interesting to think about between episodes. Think about Don Draper and you'll know what kind of character I'm speaking of. I would have gladly spent more time watching Tulip do her thing than seeing them build up to the second use of The Word. Yes, we realize that Linus has issues at the baptism. Yes, we get the symbolism of the bus driving by. So we're getting to the payoff and his first line is: "You can't just walk into my house and turn the tub on!" Wut? OK, fine. Maybe it was ad-libbed. Maybe they really didn't think there was a better line that, you know, could involve the fact that they both knew why Jesse was there and how they both knew that they'd been together at another, more conventional, baptism.

Alright, fine. Never mind. I'm quibbling about details, right? In fact, I liked some of the details; like the large CD collection in the front room. If this is taking place in the 90s when Preacher was originally written and published, that would've been normal. But if it's in the present day, maybe it's just an indication of the "other side of the tracks" nature of the whole town. Great. That works. And then he uses The Word...

So, when Jesse uses The Word, it's usually a crisis moment. I've written about the problem with abilities that only appear when the story needs them before and Preacher, the comic, avoided that snafu to a certain degree. It is, of course, way too early in the story to be overly concerned about the problem of trivializing the greatest manifestation of what makes Jesse "the Preacher", but it's also too early to have it easily explained by those it affects, too. When he uses the power, instead of Linus being utterly disoriented, he recovers in seconds and begins asking plot questions: "What'd you do to my brain?" How is it that obvious? This guy's face is burning, he's soaking wet, he's lost a chunk of his memory, and he's immediately aware of what happened to him? Hm. Yeah. I don't buy it. It sounds too much like the directors trying to spoon feed the story (in episode 2), rather than letting it develop.

OTOH, they introduce Odin Quincannon (yes, that's who the old guy (Jackie Earl Haley) is; no, that shouldn't be a spoiler) and spend exactly zero time giving any detail on just who he is and what he means to the local community. We get to see Donny break a guy's nose on the car horn, but don't know why we've had this little interlude and aren't given anything particularly strange to make us remember it. Why not? They came in, got a deed, and demolished a house. I mean, I guess that's weird but there didn't seem to be any follow-up to it that made it particularly memorable. The only reason I'm mentioning it is because of the lack of substance, not because it was particularly interesting.

So, yeah. A lot of problems. I'm far less enthused about this week's production than I was about the pilot and I wasn't head-over-heels about the latter in the first place. I actually looked at the clock while I was watching this one, if that gives you any indication of just how enthralled I was. I'm not bailing yet. It's not Constantine-level of god-awful. But I have a far more jaundiced eye for what's coming.

From the pulpit

Last week, one of the guys on the board asked me if I'd be interested in doing some reviews/critiques of Preacher, since it's based on the comic of the same name by Garth Ennis.and Steve Dillon. I said that I was a little reluctant, since the series, while good, had failed to really reach "classic" status with me because the story ended up being less about the high concepts that initiated it and more about "being cool" and/or shocking. The story began with Jesse Custer, the preacher in question, asking essential questions about human nature and its relationship to the unknowable and how that combination generated things as disparate as kindness and savagery, righteousness and hypocrisy. But what it ended up veering into was more like a parade of shocking moments, handled with blasé aplomb by most of the main cast, that didn't really invest in any of those high-minded concepts.

If you've ever seen Ocean's Eleven (either version), you'll know what I'm talking about. The film(s), while entertaining, are basically just an excuse for a dozen A-listers to get together and hand scenes off to each other and have a good time. Their entire reason for being on screen is to "be cool." That might be fun to watch, but it's also not much of a story. Preacher, the comic, ended up being a lot like that. I read the whole series, but I can't tell you anything about the last year of it because it really didn't matter by then. So when I saw the trailers and ads begin appearing for AMC's Preacher adaptation, I kind of cringed at the thought of what they could and couldn't do. AMC has been pretty reliable in developing intelligent shows that stick to their overarching themes (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc.) and in keeping the writing and story pretty intelligent. Would they be able to do that with what I considered an entertaining but essentially flawed product?

Right off the bat, I was a little cagey about Dominic Cooper as Jesse. When the show opens, the impression I got wasn't that he was questioning himself and his place in the world but more that he was... weak. This wasn't the supremely self-assured Jesse Custer that I remembered, who used that confidence to mask so many stories about his past and his family that he'd rather forget. This was someone who was on shaky ground, period. But by the time he was beating the shit out of Donny (Shut the fuck up, Donny!; What happens when the Confederate Army is beaten by a Texan?), I was more comfortable with him. I still think he lacks a bit of the gravitas necessary to really pull off the moments when he uses The Word, but we'll see how he does. As much as Tulip and Cassidy play major roles in the story, it revolves around Jesse and the entity inside him, which makes for a big role to carry. Nothing that he's done before will compare to this.

Similarly, Ruth Negga as Tulip struck me as an odd choice. The key to Tulip was that, although she was hard as nails, the way that Dillon drew her in the comic simply screamed "femininity". The two aren't completely exclusive but, again, it would be a difficult role to pull off for a TV audience. I actually like that writers/directors Seth Rogen (yes, that Seth Rogen) and Evan Goldberg used what may be interpreted as a gratuitous shot of Negga's shapely ass in a shadowed window to express some of that femininity, since the rest of her appearance was nothing but hardcore, including her opening as she struggled with and murdered two men in a speeding car over a meth deal. I think that display of the feminine arcs more toward "sexuality", but there's nothing wrong with that, especially since her relationship with Jesse in the earlier part of the story is fairly combative and creates dramatic tension between the two that will only become more obvious if she's presented as a woman, rather than the boy her father raised. It just so happens that this woman can beat you in a fistfight, if she doesn't decide to kill you first.

And Cassidy, well... I think Joe Gilgun actually hit the mark right away. It takes a while for Cassidy as a character to become something other than a stereotype, as weighted down as he is by so many things (vampire, drunk Irishman, parasitic addict) that we've seen time and again. In that respect, yes, Gilgun was those things. Does that make him more or less appealing for future episodes? I guess that depends on just how interested the showrunners are in retaining the tragedy of the storyline that he embodied in the comic (Can you tell I'm dancing around spoilers here? Yes, I am.) Believe me when I say that there's a lot more to Cassidy than his panoply of stereotypes, but it will heavily depend on AMC and the writers' willingness to engage.

The rest of the cast was decent for the limited time they had and, yes, it was thrilling to see W. Earl Brown (Dan Dority from the long-lamented Deadwood) make his return to a role (Sheriff Hugo Root) that might actually have some meat on it, as opposed to the boilerplate he was given in the utterly forgettable True Detective, season 2. The most interesting development may have been the introduction of Emily Woodrow (Lucy Griffiths) as the apparent lone "straight" among the crowd of the disjointed. There is a fair amount of story that can be mined from having a character who reacts to things with some degree of shock/fear/disdain so that we can be introduced to the world of the disjointed along with her. But that also removes the show from the realm of things like Carnivale (to name another long-missed HBO production), where everyone was weird and you were just invited to look in to their world. Perhaps Emily is the showrunners' way of keeping to the themes that I felt that Ennis lost in the comic? That's feasible, since she does seem to be intended as a grounding element for Jesse. I just hope it doesn't descend to something pedantic.

In the end, my only real complaint was about Arseface, which seems appropriate for the guy who's suffered the most among the cast. The actor (Ian Colletti) was fine, but I think the production kind of dropped the ball on the prosthetics. What we got wasn't nearly as interesting as what we'd seen before although, admittedly, trying to translate Dillon's artwork to "reality"

is going to be a difficult task for just about anyone and would involve a much larger time investment on the part of both makeup and the actor (and a lot more money) to pull off in a way that would be fitting. "Don't mind losing a section of your jawline for this role? Great! You'll be famous!"

So, yeah, overall not a bad start. It's definitely worth watching a second episode, unlike, say, Constantine. Or TD season 2.