10 TV Shows That Were Right To Deviate From The Source Material

5. Preacher

Strictly speaking, it€™s a little early to tell how the Preacher television show for AMC will differ from the comics that inspired it: the first ten-episode season doesn€™t debut until May 2016. However, there are few comics fans more rabid than those that have fixed themselves, barnacle-like, to Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon€™s cheerfully blasphemous Southern Gothic masterpiece of the grotesque. Every interview, every still, every casting choice, every trailer has met with the kind of gimlet-eyed scrutiny that conspiracy theorists apply to footage of the Kennedy assassination. It€™s been made very clear to those fans for some months now that there are characters and situations in the comics that will never see the light of day on television. The American Horror Story anthology and, to a lesser extent, True Blood, have proven that the oddball, deviant cornucopia of weirdos, killers, freaks and b*stards that populate the pages of Preacher can have a home on cable€ but many of those components of Preacher€™s narrative simply didn€™t work in the comic, played for shock value and outlandish laughs as childish humour and risquee, gruesome sight gags. There€™s the insistence that fat people are funny because they€™re fat; the barely concealed homophobia; the positioning of all manner of sexual deviance as hilarious aberration; the many times that rape is used as a one-liner, a threat or a humorous plot-device. Barely any of these unfortunate people and moments are vital to the plot: many are actually extraneous and affect the pacing. One of those characters is Arseface, who will sadly make it into the show. Here€™s hoping that they find a place for him in the narrative€ unlike the comic itself, which could have stripped out every reference to the character and still told exactly the same story. Garth Ennis just thought that the idea of a gormless Kurt Cobain fan trying to blow his own face off with a shotgun and surviving, horribly mutilated was funny as f*ck.