TORONTO — Gore abounds in the second season of the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg series Preacher, airing Mondays on AMC, as Dominic Cooper’s church-leader character searches for God.
Bodies are shot up, limbs and intestines are strewn about, and a tongue is ripped out of a man’s mouth.
It’s standard stuff for the dark comedy, which is based on the ’90s comic book franchise by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon.
But it’s not the type of content that would make the cut under Sony Pictures’ recently announced “Clean Version” film initiative, which Rogen criticized on Twitter. That plan involves Sony making sanitized, family-friendly versions of R and PG-13 rated movies available for home viewing.
“I only know what I’ve read in the news and stuff and it seems as though they’ve now taken a position that they’re going to get the permission of their filmmakers before doing that, which I think is at least a step in the right direction,” Rogen said in a phone interview.
“I think to force any director to do it … is wrong. If some of the directors are OK with it, then that’s fantastic and power to them and I have no issue with that. But the idea that they seemed [initially] to be doing it without the filmmakers themselves either having permission or oversight over the process is what seems potentially scary to me.”
This season of Preacher takes on more of the shape of the source material than the first season.
Cooper’s character, a small-town Texas preacher with a criminal past and unusual powers, hits the road to find God. Joining him is Tulip O’Hare, his tough ex-girlfriend played by Oscar-nominated Ruth Negga, and 119-year-old Irish vampire Cassidy, played by Joseph Gilgun. As they are hunted by a vicious cowboy killer from hell, they wind up in New Orleans.
The first episode of Season 2 is dedicated to Dillon, who died last October.
Rogen and Goldberg, who are longtime collaborators and fans of the comic, directed and developed it for TV along with Breaking Bad producer Sam Catlin. The Superbad writers strayed somewhat from the original source material for Season 1, with the comic creators’ approval, to establish the characters as well as the emotional stakes and the abstract parts of the story.
They were confident that as long as they were doing things that they wanted to see from the comic, the fans would agree.
“Because we are fans of the comic, really,” said Rogen. “So as long as we can sleep at night, I think it’s a pretty good indicator that we are not ruining it.
“And Garth, who wrote the comic, we talk to him quite regularly and he is at least aware, if not involved in, all these decisions that we’re making.”
The show strikes a tricky balance of incorporating comedy into violent scenes and twisted scenarios, which the comic does as well.
“The idea of extreme violence that also is funny has just always been something that me and Evan have been very big fans of,” said Rogen, who is also executive producing the sci-fi comedy series Future Man for Hulu with Goldberg. They also just shot a pilot called Singularity for Fox.
“As we moved into the second season of the show, one of the conversations we had the most was: ‘What can we do that nobody else can do? What can we do so that when you’re watching Preacher, you really feel like you’re watching something that you wouldn’t see anywhere else on television?’ And an angel killing himself 30 times within a few minutes is one of those things.”
