Guess We Know What Banners Will Hang At SDCC: Preacher Greenlit For Production By AMC

Several months ago, in a halcyon time when Boston wasn’t buried under a foot and a half of wet snow and Parker the Kitten was gleeful to get dry cat food as opposed to crawling on the kitchen table trying to gobble my damn risotto, we reported that AMC, the network that brought you The Walking Dead and The Killing (which, ironically, stumbled around after it should have been dead long after any of Robert Kirkman’s walkers), had bought the rights to develop a television series out of Garth Ennis’s and Steve Dillon’s Preacher. This was good news, while the fact that the project was to be developed by Seth Rogen was, well, weird news.

Of course, a development deal is a long haul away from an actual greenlight – just ask any 80s stand-up comic who got a five-figure check from a TV network, only to discover that it was worth relative pocket change to NBC to make sure that they wouldn’t complete with Leno, just before having to head back home to Podunk to catch a straight job on the swing shift packing bananas – and even though the rumor was that AMC paid beaucoup delores for the rights to the comic, that doesn’t mean that they would be willing to chuck the bucks behind a story that requires producing sets of not only a massive compound in the Middle East, but of a massive gun and tank battle in the desert, not to mention fucking Heaven itself.

Well, it looks like AMC thinks a little more of Preacher and the production abilities of Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, because after years of various movie, TV and HBO rumors, Preacher has been greenlit for development.

Here’s Rogen’s and Goldberg’s statement on the deal:

This is amazing! We’ve tried for seven years to work on Preacher and we’re so psyched AMC is finally letting us. It is our favorite comic of all time, and we’re going to do everything we can to do it right. Humperdoo!

Of all the hooks and catchphrases in Preacher, they just had to reference the one by the drooling spastic who throws his own feces, huh?

Cool Story, Rob!

Here’s what Ennis had to say about the deal:

Steve Dillon and I are very happy to see Preacher being developed for TV, which seems a much more natural home for the story than a 2-hour movie. Between them, Sony TV and AMC have brought viewers two of my favorite shows with Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and it’s exactly that kind of creative commitment and courage that Preacher needs. Obviously it’s taken a while, but Ken Levin along with Neal Moritz and his team refused to give up, long after the point when I myself grew skeptical, and their unrelenting enthusiasm for the project has gotten us where we need to be. I’m particularly impressed that Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Sam Catlin understand Preacher fully — meaning they get it for what it is, not some vague approximation. All in all, it looks like Preacher can now be brought to TV in a way that I’d previously not have thought possible, and I very much appreciate that Steve and I have been included in the conversation in the way that we have.

So let’s look at the positive here, beyond the fact that we’re apparently at least getting a Preacher pilot: the showrunner will be Sam Catlin, who was a producer on Breaking Bad, so hopefully some of that western-flavored, dark-humored, violent mojo will rub off on this project.

The negative is that Twitter is already, well, a-twitter, with people shouting their casting choices for the show. I saw a lot of people calling for Timothy Oliphant, who plays Raylan Givens on Justified, to play Jesse Custer, which is… stupid. Even putting aside that Oliphant is way too old to be playing Jesse Custer (a foul-mouthed, unemployed drunkard and chain smoker with a criminal record becomes vastly less sexy once one passes 35. Trust me), he is also someone who makes Timothy Oliphant money. And if we have learned anything about AMC, it is that they are not very willing to pay that kind of money.

After all, they got into a public battle with Matt Weiner over the budget for Mad Men, you know, the show that elevated the channel from being a second-rate Turner Classic Movies. Further, the channel dug in their heels and almost cut Breaking Bad‘s final season in half to save some money, and we all know about the case of Musical Showrunners that’s been happening at The Walking Dead since almost the beginning. So AMC is not going to spend a lot of bank on bringing in whatever fantasy cast we comic fans have had in mind since the late 90s.

But that doesn’t really matter. After all, other than Michael Rooker and Norman Reedus, nobody had ever heard of a single actor on The Walking Dead, and the producers still put together a solid cast that was reminiscent of the characters in the comic book.

With that said: if they don’t at least make a courtesy offer to Sam Elliott for Saint of Killers? They ain’t thinking it through. Although I would also accept Danny Trejo.

What can I say? I’m a comic fan. We don’t change.

(via Entertainment Weekly)