In today’s world of mass production and content saturation, it’s a wonder that we can still find television that is absolutely bonkers. Black Mirror stretched (and often exceeded) the limits of its ambitious anthology TV format to bring us dystopian near futures. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend brought twice-weekly outlandish musical numbers to an hour-long dramedy, paving the way for similarly manic musical programs like We Are Lady Parts and Girls5Eva. The Good Place, in the tradition of boundary-pushing shows like Community, created a singular, surreal world that surpassed the creative visions of many that came before and since. And don’t even get me started on the insane and underrated Legion, which was almost aggressive in its absurdist weirdness.
The ambitious horror masterpiece Evil, a Paramount+ program which concluded its third season on Aug. 21st 2022, is the latest in a long line of hare-brained delights, a show which revels in its inspirations while persistently questioning and deconstructing them. It is silly and ridiculous, but full of pathos, tragedy, and impending doom. It is somehow subtle in its over-the-top-ness while being over-the-top in its subtlety, which is a convoluted way of saying that this is a truly paradoxical and iconoclastic show. And it’s brought to us by Robert and Michelle King, who helmed The Good Wife.
Katja Herbers and the Great Cast of Evil
If you’re doubtful that the minds behind a long-running legal soap opera could put together an ounce of convincing horror, then you’re in for a bit of a jump scare. Not only is Evil good, it is also damn creepy – the first major-network show to “outscare” most horror television of the last 30 years. (The only thing that comes remotely close to it is the original SyFy series Channel Zero, but that anthology show has an artsier, more languid air to it.)
This incredible show, which feels like a strange hybrid of X-Files and Buffy with some high-minded aspirations, follows a team of three: lapsed-Catholic psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers of Westworld and The Americans), quiet and introspective priest-to-be David Acosta (Luke Cage’s Mike Colter), and the snarky, deceptively vulnerable contractor Ben Shakir (The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi). The three investigate paranormal phenomena on behalf of the church.
Included also are Bouchard’s four magnificent daughters and Michael Emerson as Leland Townsend, the show’s resident Merchant of Menace, who gets off on manipulating and screwing with the good guys and who straddles the show’s persistently blurry divide between the demonic and the corporeal.
Emerson, probably best known as the bad guy from Lost, gives an operatically sinister performance and makes a five-course meal out of every scene – each conversation is a chance for him to go hog-wild with his character. But while Emerson might be your ticket into this thing (and while he is more than worth the price of admission), it is Ms. Herbers who truly makes the Paramount+ subscription a must-buy for the holiday season – she brings a magnetism to her sympathetic, but mercurial protagonist.
Season 3 of Evil on Paramount+
This third-season finale of this original Paramount+ show continues Kristen’s quest down the rabbit hole of RSM Fertility to find her missing egg – a seemingly low-stakes note for the finale of a season all about devils and the apocalypse, until you remember that…oh yeah, this egg might be the Antichrist. Meanwhile, Kristen’s therapist Dr. Kurt Boggs (played by Kurt Fuller) is being drawn deeper into Leland’s satanic web and her husband (Patrick Brammall) has mysteriously reappeared yet again after another disappearance.
Things are repeating, and thus for a show that is so astonishingly silly and seemingly superficial, Evil reeks of an impossibly dire gravity. The proceedings feel fairly light, and the show is devilishly hilarious, but despite the fact that our lead characters have grown so much as people over three seasons, they have grown no more powerful in the fight against evil.
Behind closed doors, Leland and his band of followers continue to advance the agenda of the Satanic Right. And unfortunately we are no longer in the world of Buffy Summers, wherein motives and methods will ultimately be revealed. Rather, it seems possible that Kristen, David, and Ben will never fully catch up until it is too late. Maybe they are doomed to be forever behind the curve.
The Future of Horror in Evil Season 4
Our heroes’ one realistic hope is not to defeat evil, but to slowly chip away at it as they have been, to enrich each other’s lives and make their corner of the world a little brighter. Evil is an earnest thing full of love and laughter, but is also full of the most awful cruelty.
Showrunners Mr. and Ms. King, themselves in their sixties, believe in the younger generation but are also sincerely worried about them. They don’t judge us for our naïveté but, like concerned parents, they wish to warn us of our potential downfall. And unlike some other members of their generation, they seem genuinely remorseful and distraught at the world they helped to create, the world we have been forced to inherit.
The best horror has always been about this: the world, its social inequities, and the divisions that are sown amongst different groups. To defeat the monster, whether the monster is something outside ourselves or within, is to attempt to create peace within the world. But what happens when we begin to desire self-preservation and hunger for power? Does the attempt to defeat the monster, to create peace, if wrong-headed in its origin, only threaten to foster more hatred and violence? Evil seeks not necessarily to defeat the monster, but to listen to it, understand it, and make it more known. Maybe we'll understand more in season four of this critically acclaimed show.