From 1995 to 2000, writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon created 66 issues of an absurdly dark comic book series called Preacher. It’s tremendously bloody and gleefully blasphemous: a Texan preacher, possessed by a supernatural spirit that allows him to command anyone to do anything (a power called “The Word of God”), teams up with an Irish vampire and his murderous ex-girlfriend in a literal search for the Lord.

For two decades, a carousel of directors has tried to adapt the story for the screen: movie deals, TV scripts and high-profile directors have come and gone. Finally, just last week, the pilot episode of this quintessentially Christian-American satirical drama debuted on AMC under the helm of co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg – arguably the two most famous Jewish Canadian comedians in Hollywood.

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There’s a long backstory to how Rogen and Goldberg – the Vancouver-born duo that wrote the groundbreaking Superbad, the mediocre Pineapple Express and the needlessly controversial The Interview – finally brought the comic to life. (Long story short: they’re big fans and have been pushing for its creation for a decade, banking on their present-day clout to finally adapt it.)

At first blush, they’re a totally bizarre pick. It would have been more obvious for some lapsed Catholic director who knows the material inside out to sketch out a scathing critique grounded in harsh Christian reality, offering personal insight Rogen and Goldberg, as outsiders, could never know.

But comics are an intimate medium, a personal confession between the author and reader. That the story was originally written by Ennis, an Irish atheist raised among fervent Catholic imagery, is unsurprising. Television, though, is a broadcast medium – and it feels just as right that two Jewish comedians would be so driven to expose this content to the world, point to the religion’s inherent contradictions and brutal folklore and say, “Isn’t this messed up?”

“The truth is, in Judaism, there’s very little hellish imagery,” Rogen told the AV Club in a 2013 interview about This is the End, his and Goldberg’s gothically apocalyptic comedy. “What’s funny is, as a kid I remember being really scared of Christian imagery. Even the image of Jesus, to me, was horrifying.”

Zoom out and you’ll find that Rogen and Goldberg have forged their entire careers from an outsider’s perspective, a staple for Jewish comedians since the Silent Era and Catskills stand-up days. The duo’s semi-autobiographical Superbad is wholly premised on lame kids trying to be cool; The Interview mocks North Korea from a Western viewpoint so bluntly that Kim Jong-un basically threatened nuclear war if Sony released it; in This is the End, a movie where God-loving Christians are literally rewarded by ascending to heaven, Rogen stands there dumbly and asks, “There’s a God? And an apocalypse? How weird is that?”

Rogen and Goldberg are a little more creatively constrained with Preacher, whose story has already been written, start to finish. To their directorial credit, they deftly shadow their bromantic filmmaking style under the hood of a comic-book veneer: characters mutter lines to themselves in silhouette and the cinematography is as dark as the script. In many ways, too, the pilot feels like numerous other AMC benchmarks: the slow burn of Mad Men, the gory horror of The Walking Dead, the vast desertscapes of Breaking Bad – the latter had  many episodes produced, written or directed by Preacher’s third co-creator, Sam Catlin.

But the subject matter is, perhaps unexpectedly, a perfect match for two goofy Jews. It’s critical of a dominant Christian establishment and unwavering in its absurdism. The show is violent, yes, but not against Christianity per se – it’s a dispassionate, unflinching and frankly hilarious analysis of the struggle behind belief. The story may have been penned by an atheist, but it’s fitting that two Jews got to show it to the world. n