“The Bondsman” isn’t based on a comic book, but the Prime Video series seems like it could be. Produced by genre mainstay Blumhouse, the action-horror hybrid stars Kevin Bacon in the titular role as Hub Halloran, a fugitive hunter who abruptly switches employers when he’s murdered and brought back to life. Where Hub once pursued petty criminals, he’s now charged with rounding up escaped demons by the Devil himself.

Hub’s new gig unleashes a torrent of comically exaggerated gore and populates his world with even more colorful characters. He already has a hyper-Bostonian nemesis, his ex-wife’s current boyfriend Lucky (Damon Herriman, an Aussie doing a truly lamentable accent); now he has a boss, Midge (Jolene Purdy), who gathers souls for Satan on the side of her home bakery business. The mix of sacred and profane recalls “Preacher,” the AMC series that was itself an adaptation of a Garth Ennis title from the 1990s. “The Bondsman” creator Grainger David and showrunner Erik Oleson (“Daredevil,” “The Man in the High Castle”) are working from an original idea, but they take tonal inspiration from another medium.

At first, “The Bondsman” embraces the silliness of Hub’s situation. After taking a couple episodes to establish its premise, there’s a procedural rhythm to Hub’s hunting expeditions, tracking targets from a possessed priest to a Satanic cheerleader. Hub initially has his throat slit by some of Lucky’s hired goons, and from the moment he wakes up inside of a wall before smoking a cigarette out of his still-open wound, “The Bondsman” works best when it leans into a macabre sense of humor.

But with just eight half-hour episodes in its first season, “The Bondsman” has to move from setup to payoff before it can comfortably settle into a prolonged middle stretch. Hub is a second-generation bondsman, having followed in the footsteps of his acerbic mother — and, as a middle-aged divorcée, roommate — Kitty (Beth Grant). Once Kitty learns the story behind her son’s miraculous recovery, a set of circumstances she accepts with shocking equanimity, she makes for an amusing accomplice as Hub seeks to round up wayward souls. But the circle of those in the know continues to widen, encompassing less interesting relationships like the torch Hub still carries for his ex Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles of “The Righteous Gemstones”). A subplot about their once-mutual interest in music, before Hub gave up on his dreams, feels tacked-on, while Maryanne herself never comes into focus as more than an object of her former husband’s yearning.

Even though “The Bondsman” is named for Hub’s job, it wants the viewer to be equally interested in his personal life: his lapsed artistry, and his quest to redeem himself for the sins that made his soul Old Scratch’s to send back in the first place. Given how these storylines gradually kill the perverse, tongue-in-cheek vibe, however, I wish the show’s attention were lavished elsewhere. Almost every episode is named after a demon, but few evil spirits are developed into true, “Buffy”-style monsters of the week, instead remaining indistinct blurs of CGI. The demons’ earthly vessels, too, turn out to be thin sketches. Some are corrupt cops and teen bullies whose maliciousness could be a little more fleshed out; others are children or general innocents, begging questions about who gets chosen as prey the show doesn’t care much to answer.

The cosmology of “The Bondsman” is generally hazy, which isn’t a problem when the show keeps things light and snappy. (Why do Hub’s assignments come through via fax machine? Because the Devil is old, and it looks cool in a slightly creepy way!) But the stakes accelerate all too quickly from running errands on Hell’s behalf to saving the world, and while Bacon is quite comfortable as a charming-yet-scuzzy dirtbag, his charisma isn’t enough to hold the entire enterprise together. “The Bondsman” starts strong, but before long, Hub’s vintage truck has run out of gas.

All eight episodes of “The Bondsman” are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.