'Preacher' season 2 premiere review: On the road - Goes off with a bloody bang!

★★★★★

God has packed his bags and fucked off from heaven, and Jesse Custer knows it. Now it's up to a lapsed preacher, a sexy criminal, and a Irish drug-addled vampire to track Him down and hold Him accountable for His disappearance. If there's some need for assistance, then maybe Jesse and co will be able to provide it. If God has simply abandoned His creation, then Jesse has sworn to hold Him accountable for the disappearing act. It's a bold claim, and it's going to shape up to be a long, strange journey across south America.

I have to give mad props to Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. As directors, they seemed to have grown significantly into their responsibilities. The opening of the premiere episode of Preacher is just so technically impressive, as they go from Cassidy ranting and raving about circumcision and how the government are putting them in our face creams, to a full-fledged shoot-out between a half-dozen highway patrol officers and an unkillable cowboy with hand cannons in the most tarantinoesque of fashions (and I fucking loved it). In between we got a little bit of comedy and one of the best car chases on television in the last twenty years. I could be wrong, but it appears at first glance that the car chase between Tulip's 1972 Chevelle and a bunch of county mounties is done by actual stunt drivers using actual real cars.

If there's CGI, it's very subtle, but it really does look like a real car doing real car physics. That's amazing in this day and age, and it fits right into the aesthetic that the show is cultivating. From the slight grain to the washed out colour scheme, everything about the opening scene of Preacher is right out of the late 1970s, right down to where the cameras are mounted on the car to get the interior shots. It's instantly evocative of an era of car movies, and even if Dexys Midnight Runners' Come On Eileen is from 1982, it's a perfectly amusing song for Cas, Tulip, and Jesse to sing along to after successfully evading the police...

That the car runs out of gas immediately after getting away isn't terribly surprising, because it seems as though Jesse and crew have the worst possible luck (Which I think they cause themselves half the time). At every turn it seems like they run into trouble, and while Jesse has the ultimate 'get out of jail free' card in the form of Genesis, I like the fact that he's restrained from using it not by his own innate sense of goodness (he seems to get a kick out of using it for pranking purposes) but because Tulip thinks it's not far. That she makes a distinction between beating information out of someone with violence versus a nonviolent mental manipulation is interesting. There's a certain honesty in just beating someone until they talk isn't there, and it seems to be more how Jesse has historically conducted himself prior to Genesis finding him. The old saying about the corrupting abilities of power proves itself valid once more.

In the midst of car chases and shoot-outs, Sam Catlin's script has managed to constantly keep providing fun character moments for the three amigos. The interplay between Cassidy, Jesse, and Tulip is going to be the core of the show, and it is already starting to show (there chemistry has grown considerably since the first series), and regardless of their mission, or how many action scenes or jokes they may have in an episode, the three are what's going to make the show something other than dumb fun (not that there's anything wrong with dumb fun). There's not a tonne of emotional resonance, quite yet, but I have no doubt that there will be more of it along the path between Texas and wherever God has fucked off to.

The characters are fun, and there's a great chemistry between Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga, and Joseph Gilgun. Negga and Cooper, as befitting their real-life relationship, have palpable chemistry with one another, and the relationship feels appropriately lived-in, with Gilgun playing a great third wheel, consistently wedging himself between Tulip and Jesse to sublime comic effect. His growing crush on Tulip is going to be a problem, as it his guilt over his sleeping with her behind Jesse's back. The fact that Gilgun is a great physical comedian only helps the character's awkwardness, and he's got one of the funnier moments in the show as he crawls and hides his way through the massive opening gunfight trying to keep out of the sunlight.

That opening montage, and some of the later elements, encapsulate what Preacher is about. It's a comic book television show, and it's over-the-top in pursuit of entertainment. It's blood-splattered craziness, pushing the limits of gore in the pursuit of comedy (which works, I laughed repeatedly during the opening gunshots) without losing how horrible violence can be (see also the ripped-out tongue later in the episode).

It's all about tone; Sam Catlin, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg have successfully found a tone for Preacher, and it highlights the show's comic sensibilities—as well as the sensibilities of the creators. It's a great match between creative team and source material. I have no doubt that the team will be able to keep the road movie fresh on the journey to track down God.