It feels wrong to call Preacher one of the best shows of the year. Because, now that the series is over, it seems clearer than ever that we were never watching just one show.
Over the course of 10 episodes, Preacher has often been two different programmes at once. The most obvious one was a dazzling, Tarantino-esque vision of gore and gross-out humour. This is the show we saw in the set pieces: when we first met wildcard Irish vampire Cassidy engaged in a gleefully blood-soaked fight to the death on a private aircraft, or when a melee between three angels, constantly killing each other and regenerating in a motel room, saw bodies stack up like never before.
This show is great. It’s brave and funny and inventive. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have created a giddy spectacle from a comic book that is more out-and-out fun than anything Marvel has ever put on television. If it had been a string of violent set pieces and nothing else, that would be reason enough to love Preacher.
But the show that lurks between the set pieces is even better than that. That show is Breaking Bad. An enormously heightened version of Breaking Bad, sure, but still Breaking Bad. Rogen and Goldberg’s creative partner is Sam Catlin, who worked on Breaking Bad and wrote the classic episodes Fly and Crawl Space. It is shot on the same Albuquerque sound stages, with many other scenes taking place in that familiar New Mexico wilderness. Last week’s episode even contained an overt nod to the show, with two characters being picked up in the exact location where Walter White was taken to New Hampshire, stray animal and all.
Outside these superficial similarities, though, Preacher shares a surprising number of themes with Breaking Bad. It is about the slow erosion of idealism, and the compromises that must be made in order to see a plan to fruition. It is a story about an ostensibly good man struggling with a power he can’t handle, even if that power is literally godlike. Dominic Cooper’s Jesse Custer is on a slippery slope. He is hurting people, and he doesn’t seem able to stop. He is Heisenberg in a dog collar.
The magic happens when these two shows collide. One of Custer’s flock, for example, is a boy named Eugene – a pariah because, after a botched suicide attempt with a shotgun, his face now strongly resembles an anus. He is a one-joke character, but he slowly gains the role of Custer’s conscience, keeping him in line by reigning in his more vengeful instincts. However, in episode six, Custer does something awful to Eugene. He effectively cuts his own conscience loose, and the effects are staggering; it’s a moment on a par with Walter White letting Jane choke on her own vomit. Suddenly our hero starts to look a lot like a monster, and this is the grey area where Preacher does its best work.
Sadly, there was barely any grey in last night’s finale. Although peppered with standout moments – such as the chaos in the aftermath of God going missing – the episode felt rushed, as if the showrunners realised too late that the rest of the series had been improperly paced. Also, the decision to kill off all but four of the cast with exploding cow farts came off as cheap and unearned.
Preacher will not be the same when it returns next year. It is no longer a story about a single town, because that town doesn’t exist any more. Preacher is a road trip now, about three weirdos on the hunt for an absentee God. It might be able to pull off this new direction, or it might not. The best case scenario is that it will be just as fun and brave as the highlights of this season. The worst case? At least we’ll have another version of Preacher to add to the pile.
