‘Evil’ Is Over

By Lindsay Traves | TV | August 26, 2024 |

By Lindsay Traves | TV | August 26, 2024 |

How do you eulogize a show about Christianity, faith, and the devil? My colleagues elsewhere will provide recaps and episode reviews, but I’m concerned with everything that brought us to lamenting the ending of a rising star television show. Evil (A Pajiba favorite) had a long (but maybe not long enough) journey from network television to streaming to cancellation (and its opportunity to slap on an extra four episodes to wrap up the story). For better or for worse, we sent the assessors — David, Ben, and Kristen — off into that goodnight and are left wondering just what a streamer might do if it picked up a Roman-set Vatican spy drama.

Evil’s final season was often a meta-comment about its own cancellation, an early dramatic catalyst being the Church’s cancellation of the assessor program. And beyond that, there were the quips about things like “diversity” hires being promoted right before a shutdown, and lamentations about how despite constantly being told what a success the assessor program was, it was still being sunsetted. While the characters burned their own case files (reminding the audience of their earlier case-of-the-week times) and said goodbye to each other, Evil had them stop to contemplate the best and worst versions of their futures. Whether it was looking at their alternate selves on “Find My Dopple” or seeing their worst nightmares manifest in an AI game, the final four episodes of Evil showed us the various possibilities of where our characters could or could have ended up, even leaving us with a dreamlike final few minutes that may or may not have been literal.

Evil’s finale moved somewhat quickly to try and tie up its loose ends, Ben (Aasif Mandvi) throwing his tinfoil (and the haunting brain melting that might have led to it) to the wayside, Leland (the menacing and hilarious Michael Emerson who makes you want to see the character withstand almost anything) being left alive, and the implication that it’s the Vatican that’s been the real evil all along. Lexis still has a tail, Leland didn’t age rapidly after losing access to his IVs, Andy is in the wind (as a friend hilariously noted: the show had him “jettisoned into space”), and DF seems to still not have delivered on their promise of the end of days. The Sixty (the evil demon families represented by each devilish sigil) are still well, using video conferencing and technology to spread malevolence instead of a hokey black mass.

This might not serve as a natural end to their story but it is the ultimate manifestation of the show’s implications about technology and social media as the best conduit for evil. Ben has found himself a high-paying tech job, and Kristen (Katja Herbers), who had earlier been setting up a private practice, has perhaps gone with David (Mike Colter) to Rome, where he’s joined the Vatican’s ‘The Entity’ and reinstated her position. There’s space left for a spin-off or for the show to get picked up by another streamer, and a light suggestion that maybe some of the show was just fun nonsense that needn’t be resolved. In the finale’s final moments, Kristen and her daughters and son are seen galivanting in a dreamlike version of Rome, David looking like the slickest ordained superspy, and Timothy flashing cartoonish long fangs. Whether this is meant to be a literal scene or one that will be lopped off for any possible spinoff, it does feel like the ultimate outcome of the show’s ascent into camp.

In Evil’s earlier seasons, it felt like creators Robert and Michelle King, who are known for their network procedurals, were making another of the sort. Sitting somewhere between a network police drama and The X-Files, the assessors had spooks-of-the-week that they were meant to tear down, while the thread of Leland and his master plan was loosely holding the seasons together. Though launched on CBS, the show was later moved to Paramount+, which ended up renewing the series for more seasons and seemingly led the show to drift further away from weekly solutions and deeper into horror comedy and silly camp. It’s almost difficult to recall the earlier times when Kristen sidestepped around murder investigations as we got further into David ‘remote viewing’ and Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin) stomping on and tormenting cartoony demons.

While always suggested by the nature of the premise, Evil never asked the audience to choose good or evil, Church or Satanism. The assessors never represented Church versus evil either, them standing as a collective of science and faith all looking for the same satisfying conclusions to threatening happenings. The penultimate episode revealed Leland Townsend, the character meant to represent evil incarnate throughout the series, as being formerly of the Church having left it to serve a different leader. Even the confused Cheryl (Christine Lahti) vocally rejected the patriarchy of the Church (as Kristen also purported to) to choose the side of the demon who literally squished her beneath a glass ceiling. The note handed to Giovanni (Denis O’Hare) in the finale suggesting he is the “evil coming to New York,” further illustrates the blurry lines the show has played within for its four-season run. The only “good” guys in the show are our assessors, the moral centers who bounce between science, faith, magic, various religions, evil, and good. Each character questions their faith (whether that be in their faith in science, practicality, or religion) throughout as they’re tested by the fantastical things and the regular evils they experience. Kristen kills a man to avoid a threat to her family and struggles with the choice, even with the police letting her walk away. David, a priest, forgives her on behalf of himself and on behalf of his god, while Leland uses it as an example of what makes her fit to raise the anti-Christ. Ben, ever the skeptic never shaken by the faux-evils he witnesses, struggles when he starts to have visions of a terror tailored to his culture, and the level-headed character literally wears a tinfoil hat.

With Evil having been read its last rites, we can only wonder if it will be resurrected. Its fourth season put Leland on trial, pit a newly awoken Cheryl against DF, prepared us for the rise of the anti-Christ (between The Fist Omen, Immaculate, and this, it’s been a hell [none intended] of a year for hell spawn), and continued its ongoing hatred for technology and internet “clout.” (At least we never have to hear poor Mandvi deliver a rage-filled “for clout?!” again). Its finale didn’t tie anything up into a bow, but it did what Evil grew to do best: gave us a campy last shot and told us that the real evil is subscription services.

All episodes of Evil are streaming on Paramount+