Preacher...

[fajrdrako]

I just read on Warren Ellis' blog that they're making a TV series based on Garth Ennis' comic Preacher.

How? Seems to me it's perfect for the comic book form... I can't picture it as a TV show. A failure of my imagination, no doubt. I know HBO does some outre stuff, but still.... Especially if Mark Steven Johnson is writing it - based on what I've seen from him in the past, I suspect he couldn't even understand what Preacher is about, though I may be misjudging. Is is fairly visceral. He probably gets that.

I guess television really isn't what it used to be. I see from the Wikipedia article that they'd once thought of making Preacher into a movie with James Marsden playing Custer. That would have been cool.

Comments

[tigertrapped.livejournal.com]

I heard something weirder - they're making a comic book of Wuthering Heights. Why??

[rosiespark.livejournal.com]

they're making a TV series based on Garth Ennis' comic Preacher.

Very strange. Can't think that it would work. Though, to be honest, I've never managed to explain the fascination it holds for me in comic book form.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

I expect it'd work better in TV form than in movie form, to be honest--or at least that it would require much less in the way of distortion. TV's a naturally episodic format, and (especially with the prevalence of DVDs and other rewindable media)[1] there's much more of a chance to let something build slowly, and tie things in and back and through.

This is invaluable for actually suspending people's disbelief. I figure that if you had to fit Genesis, Custer, Tulip, Cassidy, and the Saint of Killers into a two-hour movie, then (a) it wouldn't fit well--if you just read all the dialogue in the first seven issues aloud, I suspect you'd go over two hours, and that's not even counting time for spaces between lines--and (b) around the time (I'm guessing twenty minutes in) it was confirmed that you had metaphysical spawn symbiotically possessing a preacher *and* a hundred-year-old Irish vampire, most of the audience would have written it off as a bad job (which is a shame, as they would be in no fit frame of mind to appreciate the Saint of Killers).

Brief related note: Movies that are referring to something outside the immediate story toss in little references to please the viewers who know that story (Wolverine's joke about yellow spandex in X-Men, or Sean Beane's "Still sharp." in LotR) and let it go. TV shows have a chance to drop it into the background and come back to it; the slow build of character and plot in /Deadwood/ is something I don't think I've ever seen equalled in a movie. (The fact that you're looking at a dozen hours a season may have something to do with this.)
---
[1] Which strikes me as giving the viewer the same broad access to the material that you can get in a graphic novel, which still seem to be beating the hell out of the paphlet form, tangent.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Not my cuppa, but I suspect the right talent could make it a good adaptation.