SXSW Review: AMC’s ‘PREACHER’ developed by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg receives unanimous praise

James Cole Clay // Film Critic 

AMC screened their upcoming series PREACHER for 1,200 SXSW audience members to overwhelmingly positive acclaim ahead of its May 22nd premiere. The ten episode first season was developed by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Steve Dillion with Dominic Cooper starring as the titular preacher Jesse Custer.

Rogen and Goldberg explained that “this is a passion project that has been in the pipeline for a decade,” their visual prowess captures the barren west Texas landscape complete with quirky characters and a potentially career making performance from Cooper. Keep in mind the audience was only able to see the pilot, but reactions throughout the episode were filled with laughs, and shrieks when the gore kicked into high gear.

Based on the comic book series of the same name the serialized format of the show will be able to draw upon the characters that fans of the comic book have admired for years including Custer, Cassidy and Tulip (who received an raucous applause from the crowd after her introduction).

Cooper’s take on Custer is a tall, dark, handsome motif who is clearly battling demons internally and possibly externally while his waning congregation gets put on the back burner. Cooper has room to grow into the character as we will most assuredly learn more about his backstory. Like many other television shows PREACHER is incredibly spoiler heavy so other plot details are being kept under wraps for now.

Rogen said “this is the first time we’ve screened this for an audience, but we did show it to some critics a while back, but they’re not people” he joked. PREACHER is teed up to be a surefire hit for AMC and it appeared on Twitter that fans of the DC comic book were pleased with what they saw.

PREACHER premieres on May 22 on AMC.