Constantine will not be allowed to smoke on TV

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Good news for anti-hero John Constantine, who smokes thirty or so Silk Cut cigarettes a day, he’s been cured! All he had to do was talk to the standards & practices department at NBC and he is now on the right track to a cleaner lifestyle. Seriously though, with the upcoming show Constantine arriving on network television, it has been revealed that the character is not allowed to smoke according to pilot director Neil Marshall.

Collider spoke to Marshall who explained NBC’s decision:

"No we’re not (smoking). It’s the one thing, a compromise I guess. On network it’s the one thing you can’t smoke on network. That’s one of his character traits. We’re working around that. We’re trying to get aspects of it in there as much as possible. We’ll see …

Hannibal is on NBC, and that’s pretty dark and disturbing. Whatever the regulations are, you can be as dark and disturbing as you want and we’re going to go in that direction. The intention is to be as dark and scary as possible with the show. And that was our whole kind of plan going in, to make it scary. So we’re going to explore all kinds of things. But the smoking is very frustrating. Who knows where it will go; where the story will go; where the character will go. There’s still lots of options.”

So John Constantine, who is such an avid smoker that lung cancer became a pretty major plot point in the DC series, has been told to butt out. Fans of Constantine, aka Hellblazer, have been anticipating the upcoming NBC TV series as a way to hopefully correct some of the changes to the mythos brought about in the 2005 movie with Keanu Reeves. I think this single change probably casts a bigger cloud over the source material than the movie now it’s safe to say.

Smoking isn’t good for you;If you’re a smoker, you know what you’re doing to your body and what stupid choice you’re making. That can also be said for the guy in the drive-thru right now who’s buying some artery clogging options for dinner too. You reach a certain age and society hopes you're mature enough to make the right decisions for yourself. They make rules and regulations such as movie and TV ratings so that mature audiences can watch a particular show with adult themes and know that it's just a TV show. The audience for Constantine is expected to know better than to take up smoking because their new favorite TV character does it. They also know that his occult skills are fictional and not to be replicated…right?

Character is important; Constantine is a damaged man with more vices than my ex-girlfriend. Imagine if the “The Smoking Man” on The X-files was “The Gum Chewer”; I don’t think it would have resonated as much. With so much violence on TV, such as NBC’s other show Hannibal as mentioned by Marshall, featuring blood, guts, sex, drugs, and all the other sins of our rock stars, you would think smoking is the least of their concerns. I’m not advocating smoking; I just wish more people who make decisions could differentiate between fiction and babysitting.

What do you think about this decision? Would Constantine be better on cable?

Constantine premieres Friday October 24, 2014 on NBC.