Potential... Maybe

In the late 1980's Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called 57 Channels and Nothing On, about the experience that cable TV had wrought upon all of us: lots of choices and then again no choices at all.  Well, now that seems kind of quaint, only 57?  Of course, out of those 57 channels you had at least ten or twelve throwaways, public access, PBS during the day (Unless you were a kid), then there were the various news programs and pseudo news programs that were sort of like being slowly drugged with the worlds weakest tranquilizer, ESPN was around, but Sportscenter wasn't a round the clock phenomenon and you didn't even have the talk shows like PTI yet, so you mostly got daytime coverage of duck pin bowling or curling, The networks devoted most of the day to Merv Griffin and soap operas and the VHF stations (I'll explain that to the kids some other time) were mostly syndicated sitcoms rather than original programming.  Cable TV was essentially just a conglomeration of broadcast TV with a few pay channels that mostly repeated movies from three years ago in endless succession.  I try to explain this to my kids as they whine about not being allowed to use their internet thing-a-majigs any time we have 10 minutes of unoccupied time.  I remind myself of this anytime I feel like I'm getting a little too attached to my smartphone.
It doesn't work.
Springsteen had no idea that we would be where we are now by the time he was rasping out nursery rhymes to his grandkids.  Neither did I.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same.  I now have over 700 channels, all with on demand content through my TV, I also have Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, and the only thing that prevents me from shelling out the extra couple bucks a month for Hulu is the fact that I know there will still be nothing on the freaking TV worth watching. We live in an age when the potential of TV shows as a story telling medium is positively amazing: Game of Thrones, Better Call Saul (and it's antecedent Breaking Bad), The Walking Dead (which I don't watch but I hear is pretty good), Gotham (Ditto).  On top of those shows on the TV, the internet streaming services are cranking out some good stuff too: House of Cards for example.
And yet... there is still this regular occurrence where I just can't get jazzed about any of it.  Again, so many choices, but no choices at all.  Enter a show that may just be another break in the gray clouds of mass appeal media: Preacher on AMC.  I saw the commercials and I thought to myself, "I think you kind of HAVE to watch that."  After all it's called Preacher, and I'm a, you know, preacher, and it would appear to be about a preacher who is no saint in waiting, a situation which I rather identify with as well.
It's based on a comic book, and that, contrary to what you might think, is a good thing, because comic books are one of the best places to look for really edgy inventive stuff these days.  Also, being based on an established character and intellectual property with already developed story lines you don't have to worry that a show that starts with promise is just going to wander off into the abyss when they decide to fire a crucial writer.
The original Battlestar Galactica was a prime example of this pitfall.  The show started with a great premise and a pretty solid ensemble cast.  It had Lorne Greene, Mr. Bonanza himself, to give the old folks something grip on, and it had this new Science Fiction Star Trek/Star Wars clone thing going for the kiddos. It was also pretty expensive; sets, wardrobe, what passed for special effects in the late 1970's.  The Network decided they could do without something silly like writers, so they got rid of them and within months were focusing entire episodes on the adventures of a mechanical dog (I know it was called a dagget, but it was a freaking mechanical dog that looked vaguely like a bear terminator, but wasn't anywhere near that awesome (note to self, pitch for a new show: bear terminators)).  It all ended badly, and eventually they scrapped it.  Luckily for all of us, someone gave the Cylons another day in court, when special effects, the world of entertainment, and the imaginations of Science Fiction fans had all grown up a bit, and we got all the Battlestar we didn't even know we were missing, this time with grown up emotions and tattoos and lots of fracking.
Sorry, I was talking about Preacher, wasn't I?  Okay, the premise of the show is that this sort of beat up looking young man is a preacher in some run down church in nowhere Texas, trying fulfill some problem he made to his father who was also a preacher in this church in east jepip.  Thing is, he's done some things, maybe some bad things, and he's carrying a lot of scars about that stuff.  He's not very good at the whole preacher thing either.  The opening scenes are of him rolling out of bed all hung over, and taking his crumpled sermon into the pulpit and not even really understanding what he's trying to say himself.  Cut to various scenes of his congregation laying stereotypical annoyances and dilemmas on him... you get the picture, they ought to show it to first year divinity students to test their resolve.
The first episode shows him trying to be good and battling himself on the issue.  At the end of the episode he becomes the host for a half angel half demon called Genesis (this is comic book information, not show information).  Genesis has attempted to enter both an African Pentecostal preacher in a dirt floor church in Kenya (who I'm assuming represents good and honest religion), and what I believe is a Satanist (or some other brand of occultism) Magister in Russia (which is the flip side of the pure-hearted African).  Both men explode, literally and graphically (did I mention this show is not for kids, it's not, maybe not even for most adults).
Anyway, our preacher does not explode, I'm guessing because he is neither good nor evil himself, but rather he represents a non-dualistic personality where both attributes exist in some sort of uneasy balance, like, you know, most of us.
I'm not sure where the show is going from here, but given how rare a really interesting show is on the Tube, I'm looking forward to the ride, please don't fire the writers.