WAR IN THE SUN

I’m a “glass half-empty” kinda guy. That’s just the way it is. I try to judge things by the finished product and not do the typical Internet thing where I hate a project before it’s even started, but sometimes I just can’t.

PREACHER is a project that I’ve hated pretty much since its live-action inception was announced almost a decade ago.

Let’s back up a bit. PREACHER is a comic written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Steve Dillon. It’s about a Texas preacher possessed by a supernatural creature named Genesis. Genesis is the product of the coupling of an angel and a demon, making it the most powerful thing in existence. Once this power is manifested in Jesse Custer, God quits ruling Heaven and goes into hiding. Custer goes looking for him. Along the way, he picks up his old girlfriend Tulip and brings along an alcoholic vampire named Cassidy. Oh yeah, he has to avoid the Saint of Killers, too. He’s basically the angel of death out to get rid of Genesis and whatever form it’s become.

It sounds ridiculous on paper and it’s a little ridiculous in the comic, too. But it’s also fantastic. I re-read the entire series last winter and it still holds up really well. There are a few filler stories to pad the run because Ennis wanted the final issue to be number 66, but overall it’s brilliant, crazy, sweet, heartbreaking and just flat out awesome.

But the chances of it being anything other than a great comic were slim to none. I’m a firm believer that anything that spends over a decade trying to get made doesn’t need to be made. There’s always a reason that it hasn’t worked and most likely won’t work at all, no matter how hard you try. See: GANGSTER SQUAD, RUM PUNCH, etc.

Mark Steven Johnson was the first guy tasked with taking it from a comic to TV. You remember Mark Steven Johnson, don’t you? He wrote classics like GRUMPY OLD MEN, GRUMPIER OLD MEN and directed great, legendary films like SIMON BIRCH, DAREDEVIL and GHOST RIDER. That was the guy that was supposed to bring PREACHER to life. No one held their breath and after a few years the project died. It kept bouncing around and everyone from James Marsden to Kevin Smith was attached at some point. Eventually it landed in the lap of Sam Mendes and while I didn’t get excited, I was a little bit hopeful. Mendes made AMERICAN BEAUTY, ROAD TO PERDITION and SKYFALL, so there was a little bit of promise. But he’s pretty committed to a couple more James Bond movies, so that fell apart.

Things were pretty quiet on the PREACHER front until a few days ago when AMC announced that they were taking the series to pilot. Just like that. No other information was provided.

When I saw that, I didn’t really know how to feel. AMC aired amazing shows like BREAKING BAD and MAD MEN, so that was a plus. But AMC executives are also fucking morons. They almost cancelled BREAKING BAD after the fourth season because they didn’t want to pay anyone. They panicked at the last minute when FX stepped in and said, “If AMC doesn’t want you, come over here. We’ll let you do whatever you want.”

They also don’t own either of those shows. Sony owned BREAKING BAD and Lionsgate owns MAD MEN. AMC is just the network it airs on, so they don’t really have much say in what happens within the show. The two shows they own outright are THE WALKING DEAD and LOW WINTER SUN. I still watch it, but for every good thing it does, THE WALKING DEAD does two or three other things that I absolutely hate. It’s just not very good, but has the potential to be great. All AMC cares about is the numbers it gets. They couldn’t care less about the actual quality. And LOW WINTER SUN got such bad reviews that I deleted it from my DVR without watching a single episode.

So if it was going to be a full-on AMC enterprise, I was preparing for the worst. Then more details started to come out and I started getting a little excited.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were the guys behind it. Sony is the studio producing it, AMC is just the network it’ll air on. I was already hopeful with two guys like Rogen and Goldberg (they wrote SUPERBAD, THIS IS THE END and THE GREEN HORNET) on board, but then I read that Sam Catlin was also on board. That’s when I got more excited.

Sam Catlin was one of the main writers and executive producers on BREAKING BAD. He wrote and directed the Season 5 episode “Rabid Dog” where Walt has to try to convince Skyler that he had a pump malfunction when Jesse tried to burn down their house. He wrote a bunch of other great episodes throughout the series, too.

With those three calling the shots, Sony picking up the tab and AMC relegated to simply airing the episodes, it might actually work.

Then again, there is the little question about how you market a show that boils down to one man’s quest to tell God to go fuck himself while talking to the ghost of John Wayne and being chased by a guy in a duster and cowboy hat that can’t be killed – even when a nuclear bomb is dropped on him. Also, let’s not forget the vampire, the inbred, mentally challenged child with the last pure bloodline of Jesus Christ and a guy that makes sex toys out of raw meat.

If they can get over those hurdles, anything is possible.

FELINA

BREAKING BAD ended a while back. It's been a rough couple of months without a TV show to get invested in. I always save BOARDWALK EMPIRE for full-season binge watching, so that's out.

I dove right in to season 6 of SONS OF ANARCHY, but the quality of the writing and storytelling and characters was so different and so much worse that  it was hard to watch. But then I spent 6 weeks watching the slightly entertaining but utterly horrible execution of everything that is THE WALKING DEAD. After that, SONS OF ANARCHY has been looking pretty god damn brilliant.

But it still makes me miss BREAKING BAD. They're rolling out the complete set on DVD pretty soon, so a few of the special features are starting to make their way around online. On one of them, a documentary crew filmed everyone for a huge documentary about the making of the last season. They had cameras in the room when Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul read the final episode for the first time.

They divided the parts between them and read it together in Cranston's living room. It's just great. These two lived with those characters for so long that it must be hard to let go. I can only imagine what it's like to finally get to the end of something that you work so hard on.

If you guys don't see me for about a month this winter, it's because I'm holed up in my apartment watching these 62 episodes all over again and pretending that some day I'll be able to write something so god damn awesome.

OZYMANDIAS

Let's talk a little bit about BREAKING BAD for a minute.

First, I love this show. From top to bottom, I think it's probably going to go down as my favorite TV show of all time. There's really only two ways they could screw this up:

1) Reveal that they've been dead for a while and just stuck in purgatory.

or

2) Cut to black without giving anyone a definitive ending.

Those are really the only two things that could derail the ending. Otherwise, they're sticking the landing really, really well in my opinion.

I've heard a few complaints about the show and the biggest one is that every episode seems to end with them almost getting caught, but never actually getting caught. I don't feel that way, and I think that anyone that does probably doesn't watch very carefully. I never feel like Walt or Jesse is going to get caught. They're always going to get out of it and one of my favorite things about the show is seeing how they get out of those spots.

Also, everything in this show matters. Everything. Remember that little throwaway moment from season 3? Well once it comes back to haunt these characters, you'll remember and wonder how the hell they pulled that off.

Those are the things that I love about this show.

I missed the newest episode because I was at the Utah State Fair (which was awesome), but I made sure to not check email, Twitter, Facebook or anything until after I'd gotten home and had a chance to watch it. Nothing was getting spoiled. I watched it at about midnight and haven't stopped thinking about it since. I won't spoil anything big, but it was amazing.

Let's just talk about my favorite part. It works on a few different levels. Remember in the very first episode, when Walt's pants blow away as he's trying to navigate the RV out of the desert? They made an appearance the other night.

As Walt rolls a barrel through the desert to The Limeliters "Take My True Love By The Hand", he passes by them as they're strewn on the ground, covered in dirt.

More than that though, the episode itself is titled "Ozymandias" after a poem of the same name by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It's about a ruined king alone in the desert. Bryan Cranston read it over a series of images for a teaser to promote the final 8 episodes and it was great then, but it's even better now that we've gotten a full look at the events of this episode.

The poem itself is chilling, but how much the show's writers, the episode's director (Rian Johnson, who also directed LOOPER and posted some amazing behind the scenes photos on his Twitter page) and creator Vince Gilligan got out of it just reinforces how much I love this show.

If you've never seen it, you've got ten days to catch up before it ends. Join us, won't you?

I met a traveller from an antique land 

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, 

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown 

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. 

And on the pedestal these words appear: 

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: 

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, 

The lone and level sands stretch far away".