'Preacher' Showrunner Talks Introducing Heaven and Satan, Unfolding the Narrative
AMC's Preacher had a panel at Wondercon ahead of its premiere in May. Prior to that though, showrunner Sam Catlin alongside stars Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga spoke with reporters, where Catlin explained meeting and breaking the TV ice on Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.
"I would say, 'You can't pace it that way for a TV show. We won't be able to do X, Y and Z then because where would you put your sets?'" Catlin said. "Stuff like that, because they'd never really done TV before. What I like about Preacher [comics] is it has a modular [structure]. You can kind of lift and place stories all over the place sort of like episodes.
"You can tell stories all over the place. As long as you still have the drive of what Jesse wants, who he's looking for, you can go anywhere you want."
Preacher is a well known cult classic comic, and it's probably most known for its gruesome and often crass worldview. "I think we want to do it step by step," Catlin said of introducing the outrageous aspects of the story. "If we showed in the first episode DeBlanc and Fiore and Heaven and their floating space station with a hole in it... you need to ratchet these things up.
"I think the idea of the show is: oh, you're okay witth vampires now? Okay, what about this? What about this and this and this? It's like putting a frog in a bowl of boiling water or something like that so that by the time you look upon Satan, you're like, 'Okay, yeah. That makes sense.'"
Cooper mentioned that an episode set in Heaven is part of the plan. "They were all talking at the same time," Cooper said of when he met with Rogen, Goldberg and Catlin. "They were all so animated and so excited and the things they were coming out with, because I hadn't read all of the comic by that point. They were saying, 'Some of the episodes will be in this small town in Annville.Then we'll be in Heaven just for a whole potato,' something absurd like that.
"I love it and that made me even more excited about the project.
Source: Slashfilm
