A priest, a psychologist, and a scientist walk into a bar get hired by the Catholic Church to investigate demonic possessions. Each week, this team of assessors must determine if their case subject is in need of an exorcism, a mental health intervention, or a technology cleanse – all while fighting a systemic evil plaguing New York City.Â
CBS’s Evil is a perfectly executed meditation on how religion and science intertwine themselves in our modern society. Can the two coexist and work together? Or is their very nature built to oppose each other?Â
This very question is what show-runners Michelle and Robert King set out to answer in Evil. They took the legal procedural aspect from their previous show, The Good Wife, and gave it a terrifying twist. Throughout their four season run, they tackle demons, familial struggles, and structural inequality in the Catholic Church. Despite the admittedly cheesy and unassuming season one trailer, Evil leans more into the buddy cop X-files trope than a bad A24 thriller. Along with their commitment to practical effects instead of CGI, Evil is the perfect formulaic “case of the week” drama mixed with your favorite horror movie.
In Evil’s season one premiere – or dare I say, Genesis – Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) is working as a forensic psychologist to determine if alleged serial killer Orson LeRoux (Darren Pettie) is demonically possessed or simply just mentally ill. When she is forced to quit her job after the prosecution wants her to lie on the stand, she joins forces with priest-in-training David Acosta (Mike Colter) and scientist Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) to work for the Catholic Church to determine if LeRoux’s claims are real. Soon after, Kristen starts being visited by a sleep paralysis demon named George, thus questioning everything she previously believed. Throughout the rest of the trial, Kristen and the team are taunted by Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson), the prosecution’s new forensic psychologist, who shows them that LeRoux’s murder case just scratches the surface of the Evil that is coming their way.
Over the course of their first season, Kristen learns to manage her unorthodox job that sometimes puts her four daughters in harm’s way. With David and Ben by her side, the team runs into a slew of demons, possessions, and exorcisms that all seem to be connected to a high power of evil orchestrated by Leland, Satan’s right hand man. In some cases, it’s true that things like algorithms or medical miracles are the answer to their unexplained phenomena. But in others, it seems as though their demons have no true cause.Â
The thing that sets Evil apart from its typical horror counterparts is how it’s able to reflect modern concerns, even in its first season. A woman’s right to her own bodily autonomy is being debated in the United States Supreme Court; in Evil, a woman is convinced she’s being controlled by her demonic fetus, a lá Rosemary’s Baby and second wave feminism. With the looming threat of how advancing technology is damaging younger generations, Kristen’s tween-age daughters are tormented by a demon in a virtual reality headset game. While incel culture is always a very heated subject online, Leland grooms a teen boy into a demonic hatred towards women. In one episode, David becomes the victim of a white nurse known as the “angel of death” who targets Black patients, reflective of systemic racism in the healthcare industry. In another, the team is tasked with determining if a woman is schizophrenic or demonically possessed, which is all too similar to how women are always considered “crazy” when searching for medical treatment.
Not only does Evil consistently grow and adapt to ever-changing trend cycles and social issues, but the overall cast has incredible representation. Katja Herbers leads the cast as Kristen, a canonically bisexual and essentially single mother of four. As an agnostic (who may or may not be a little possessed herself), she is never afraid to call out the Catholic Church higher-ups on misogynistic bullshit and question them on the stability of their beliefs. Portrayed by Mike Colter, David is a former war journalist turned priest-in-training and the only Black person in his seminary school. Despite this, he is a fearless leader and always pushes the limit of what the Church believes he can do. Aasif Mandvi is Ben the Magnificent (as Kristen’s daughters call him), who is an atheist after being raised Muslim and is dedicated to finding a scientific way-out to phenomena he can’t explain. As the most skeptical of the bunch, he simultaneously provides the King’s famous quippy one-liners and brings the team back to Earth if they get too wrapped up in a crazy theory.
Character actor Michael Emerson truly stands out as Leland Townsend, the scariest villain of them all: an incel-y white man. His character is hell bent on ruining the lives of our core trio, and he will stop at nothing to complete his goal. As Kristen’s rival forensic psychologist, he works on overturning her past cases to release criminals. He even initiates a relationship with her mother, Sheryl (Christine Lahti), to slowly proselytize her to his demonic ways and ruin Kristen’s life from the inside. Leland works his way into high places inside the justice system or the Catholic Church, and that is what makes him so terrifying. No matter what the trio does to stop him, society will forever be structured to enable and protect sexist, demonic freaks like him.
Leland, along with many of the other villains throughout the series, force the audience to reckon with the gray area of how evil comes about. Some characters make the argument for it being innate, a true demonic way about them that stems from birth. On the other hand, some prove how easy it is to be influenced into evil. Whether it’s the more obvious nurturing into a red pill indoctrinated kind of hatred, or the slow but sinister way internet algorithms learn what makes us tick, Evil demonstrates how anyone can fall victim to the alluring power it can offer. At its core, that’s part of what Evil is about: just how easily anyone can abuse power.
This is where I’ll pass the baton off to a quote from one of my favorite culture critics, Emily Nussbaum for The New Yorker.Â
Emily Nussbaum, 2019
- “That’s the pattern on “Evil,” at least in the first few episodes. Every supernatural event has a practical explanation—but, then, every practical explanation has a sinister shadow as well, the suggestion that something very bad is going on, something that rationalists can’t quite escape. Maybe religious people are delusional, seeking meaning where none exists. Or maybe the pragmatic ones are the real naĂŻfs. Possibly both things are true, which is how the Devil builds power, in a world that feels designed to magnify malevolence, online and off, by blurring our ability to tell what’s real from what’s imaginary.”
As any good procedural show goes, it is required for them to have a slow burn couple to root for – Kristen and David are exactly that. Even though David is about to be a priest and Kristen’s husband is off running a mountain climbing business on Everest, that doesn’t stop them from having the most incredible tension on any TV show that has aired recently. If you’re like any sane person and your brain chemistry was forever changed after watching Andrew Scott as the Hot Priest in Fleabag, you will love their relationship. At one point, Kristen’s friend even asks her if she’s “fleabagging it” with David, becoming what is probably the first usage of that word as a verb.Â
In an interview with TV Guide, Katja Herbers described their relationship as having “a sexual attraction, but also very much an intellectual attraction, which I think makes it all the more sexy.” She summarized well what makes them so captivating to watch – everyone loves a forbidden relationship. Through their on screen chemistry, it’s evident that they have a deep connection despite their extenuating circumstances. However, they care for each other so much more as people that they would never do anything to jeopardize their true friendship. While it may be tragic to have to watch two people fight their mutual attraction, they are one of the last remaining slow burn couples in our current age of single season limited series’.
Though Evil gets its fair share of comparisons to the buddy-cop greats like X-Files, one thing they do exceptionally well lies in their production quality. They always employ classics of the horror genre like dutch angles and a perfectly haunting score by David Buckley. One of my truly favorite things about the show is their practical effects without ending up too gimmicky. While I don’t want to ruin the element of surprise when it comes to Evil’s villains, they’re like a car crash you can’t look away from (in the best way). The demons are equal parts terrifying as they are incredibly satisfying to watch. Underneath the mask is most often Marti Matulis, who most notably plays Kristen’s sleep paralysis demon named George, as well as various other goat-like satanic monsters.
In Evil, the Kings play with the perception of truth. Not every case they encounter is supernatural at first glance and can be resolved with simple scientific explanation. Most times, it’s not nearly as straightforward as that. Whether David is hallucinating from his hospital bed or Kristen is unsure if she’s seeing a demon, you never truly know what’s real or what is simply a figment of their imagination. Through many of their graphics and practical effects you are forced to determine what you believe could be happening. They even leave easter eggs in the form of puzzle pieces in split second frames to aid in the overall uneasiness that is Evil.
In my personal (and totally unbiased opinion), I firmly believe that Evil is the most underrated shows of this decade, and probably this century. The collective cast has incredible chemistry, the sheer quality of production is quite literally jaw-dropping, and it’s one of the few shows to really push the boundaries of political commentary on a network channel. They open dialogue about important and prevalent issues like fertility, immigration, systemic racism, and the plague of technology – all without feeling too forced or buzzword-y. Everyone that works on the show has clearly come to it with a lot of care and love for Evil and the proof is in the pudding. As October approaches, now is the perfect time to start binge watching. Evil is for you if you are a horror movie fanatic; if you binge watch procedural crime shows like Criminal Minds and Law and Order; or if you love the tension between Fleabag and Hot Priest. This show is freaky, horny, scary, and erotic and it literally could not be better. Since their final season ended just weeks ago, it’s never too late to convince anyone to watch just in time for this Halloween season.
Evil is available to stream on U.S. Netflix and Paramount+ internationally (or anywhere else if you’re dedicated enough).
