Season 3 of AMC’s Preacher is set to premiere in the next few weeks. If you know the comic series it’s based on, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, you can see why it’s been described as “unfilmable,” due to its raw storylines and genuinely disturbing characters, but Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg saw the cinematic potential in the comic’s stories and undoubtedly deserve kudos for how they’ve adapted it for television. Now they acknowledge that their work on Preacher has paved the way for yet another difficult TV adaptation: Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys.
In an interview with SyfyWire, Rogen and Goldberg describe how Amazon Studios would likely never have picked up The Boys if it weren’t for Preacher‘s success on AMC. Rogen says, “No doubt, that they would have even considered letting us do this, or anyone I would imagine, without the success of Preacher.”
Having a clear artistic vision for the show was equally critical, Rogan says, “[Preacher] was dubbed un-makable. That was crazy to us, we couldn’t have had a clearer vision of how do this. A similar thing was happening to The Boys, it was handed off to people who are, by all means, more suitable to make it than us, and for whatever reason, they couldn’t. The whole time we were like, ‘We get this, we can do this. This is not that crazy to us.’”
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The Boys is an action series focused on self-absorbed superheroes given too much freedom in a world where they are celebrities. The show will star Karl Urban, Jack Quaid, and Elisabeth Shue and centers around a squad of CIA operatives charged with monitoring the superheroes. It’s equally if not more brutal in its storylines than Preacher, with strong sexual overtones and violence. The series ran for 72 issues from 2008-2012 published by both WildStorm and then Dynamite Entertainment.
Like Preacher, The Boys has had a trying time coming to fruition. It was in the works as a movie at both Columbia Pictures and Paramount in recent years. Additionally, Cinemax originally was set to develop the TV series with Goldberg, Rogen, and Eric Kripke.
The Boys is set to air at an unknown date in 2019. The show was developed by Eric Kripke, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, and stars Karl Urban, Elisabeth Shue, Erin Moriarty, Antony Starr, Dominique McElligott, Jessie T. Usher, Chace Crawford, Nathan Mitchell, Laz Alonso, Jack Quaid and Karen Fukuhara.