The Genius of Evil

There was a giant, man-size crucifix outside of my first-grade classroom. This object—bloody and graphic—stood probably eight feet tall and was clearly meant to hang high above the altar of a large Roman Catholic church. But my grade school had wedged it into a hallway, between some administrative offices and the classrooms of little children. The spectacle of Christ’s suffering is, of course, a big number in any young Catholic’s imagination, but rarely does one have to encounter it with such Mel Gibsonian detail and intimacy at such a young age. When I think back to that crucifix now, I’m tickled by the preposterousness of it all. At the time, though, it was horrifying: My classmates and I cast our eyes down in fright whenever we had occasion to circumnavigate it.

Evil on Paramount+ is filled with images like that of the too-big crucifix: simultaneously scary and stupid, deadly serious and laughably surreal. An enormous goat-demon holding psychotherapy sessions in the humdrum fluorescent light of an office building, a sweater-vested nerd setting out crudités at a cocktail party celebrating the new leadership of a demonic order, an expressive little gremlin living inside of beloved character actor Wallace Shawn.

Evil is a philosophical epic, a show that jokingly advertises itself as a contemporary morality play about the very question of existence—wouldn’t that be hilarious?—only to actually be a contemporary morality play about the very question of existence. Its premise is compellingly bonkers. Within the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, there is a small team of “assessors” who investigate seeming miracles, possessions, and other supernatural-adjacent occurrences to determine whether they have religious significance or divine or devilish origin. The team comprises David (Mike Colter), a priest-in-training who may or may not himself be a holy visionary but who is 100 percent a stone-cold fox; Kristen (Katja Herbers), a lapsed Catholic forensic psychologist who left a spiraling career as an expert witness to join the church’s investigation unit and start up a tense will-they-won’t-they relationship with David; and Ben (Aasif Mandvi), a tech contractor whose specialty is debunking seemingly supernatural phenomena. David assesses the spiritual, Kristen assesses the psychological, Ben assesses the scientific. It may not surprise you to find that many of the cases they investigate end up being a little bit of all three.

Now in its fourth and final season, Evil has always been adept at balancing its desire to be an earnest spiritual drama with its desire to get a little goofy. And, in doing so, it has managed to access a level of profundity, even genuine intellectual insight, that most shows don’t even try for. There’s a moment in the second season when Kristen’s therapist, Dr. Boggs (Kurt Fuller), sees a demon for the first time, an obsidian creature with long talons. Boggs, who is not religious, tells Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin) about this, and she replies, with empathy and sternness, that if he does not repent, does not come to terms with that demon’s existence, then, when he dies, the demon will return and drag him into hell. This experience does not immediately bring him to the church, but it works in his life as both a material reality and a metaphor. Whether Sister Andrea is right or not, her words revealed something to Boggs about how unexamined his life and his morality really are—the common midlife crisis as exorcism. Hell, whatever that means, is real.

As the show comes to an end, it has raised the stakes—there’s literally a countdown to the apocalypse this season—but its most remarkable feature is its humane curiosity about the workaday spiritual struggles of ordinary, fallible people. Evil is a rare show that operates with style and intelligence on every level, from its classic genre beats to its lofty metaphysical inquiries. Attend, if you will, to this miracle.

Created by The Good Wife’s Robert and Michelle King, Evil is somewhat out-of-time: a forward-looking throwback—embracing the classic form of the network procedural even as it frequently pushes the medium in new and surprising directions. The Kings (a husband-and-wife team) tend to work within the strictures of network TV, concealing a creative ambition that outstrips many of their prestige streaming peers. The Good Wife was their network TV variation on the premium cable antihero drama, zippier, more episodic, more ripped-from-the-headlines than its HBO predecessors. The Good Fight was their experimental follow-up, an unhinged legal drama whose Trump-era daydreams and nightmares flourished in the formless void of streaming. It’s a bit too early to tell what Elsbeth is, a detective procedural in sheep’s clothing, or a sheep in detective procedural’s clothing.

Evil might be their best yet. The evil of the title takes a variety of forms. There are the usual possessed people and cursed spaces, but there’s also a sinister fertility clinic that’s potentially impregnating unsuspecting women with the spawn of Satan, a modern dance troupe that might be summoning pagan deities, a heavy ion collider with some spooky secrets, a demonic Siri-style voice assistant, a haunted AR game, and lots and lots of bedeviled memes.

The show’s most ingenious twist is that evil is organized, if only loosely. In the first season, the assessors discover an ancient illustration that charts a network of demonic “houses,” each represented by a sigil, and each devoted to a particular demon. This network, it turns out, has operated in the shadows for centuries, but it’s being revamped and shaped up in the present day with the help of a dastardly dork named Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson). Evil, it seems, isn’t just about blood sacrifice and blasphemy; it’s also about bureaucracy. And while temptation is easy, and sinning is easy, management is hard.

All rot, the show seems to suggest, is systemic rot. And while David, Kristen, and Ben are nominally the White Hats in this situation, as they methodically root out the tendrils of this metaphysical criminal syndicate, the show never lets go of the idea that they, too, are arms of a corrupt system. The fourth season finds David working, in secret, for “The Entity,” a Vatican covert ops team that makes use of his visionary powers to undertake spiritual espionage assignments. Is David merely having visions of violence and horror and gathering intelligence, or is he committing violent acts himself?

Kristen, meanwhile, remains the show’s most illuminating invention. This season, she is beset by evils that are increasingly intimate. It’s possible that the aforementioned fertility clinic has used one of Kristen’s eggs to bring forth the Antichrist; she nurses the baby anyway. She’s adept enough to figure out that a local dance troupe is a secret coven of witches devoted to an evil “muse”; but, by episode’s end, she’s dancing in the moonlight with the sexy sirens anyway. To the show’s credit, the prospect of the end of the world hanging over this season takes a back seat to the fate of Kristen’s soul, not necessarily as a Christian subject, but as a person in the world. She is a “good” mother, a “good” wife, a “good” partner and friend, but being all those things at once has come at a cost. This season’s upshot is eschatological, but the series’ arc is defiantly personal. Though this is a show about evil, some of its most elegant and haunting stories are about the moral compromises necessary to be “good.”

It’s long been a truism that the best dramatic series on television are often, also, among the funniest. This was certainly the case for The Sopranos, it remained true for Mad Men, it was arguably the case for Succession as well. Evil is a show like this, in the sense that it’s both a great drama and a great comedy, but also in the sense that it belongs in the company of those other series. The Kings hand-embellish each network TV convention they use, adding running variations that elevate the show’s rascally humor and its searching conscience. One episode transpires in near silence, as the gang investigates a situation at a silent abbey; one sets much of its action inside the confines of a haunted elevator; one episode this season finds Kristen and Ben unable to complete sentences. Whereas David Chase and David Simon left network TV to reinvent the form with The Sopranos and The Wire, the Kings chose to stay. For this reason, their work, at its best, is refreshing in its formal honesty. When you don’t expend any energy trying to transcend the genre, you can transcend all manner of other things instead. And yet, Evil, one of their greatest creations, and simply one of the best series on air right now, finds itself adrift in the streaming seas. After premiering on CBS in 2019, the show was shifted, for its second season, to the Paramount+ streaming platform, a fate worse than damnation. After a promising debut, the show essentially disappeared from the discourse, outside of word-of-mouth praise from die-hard fans and admirers of the Kings. In February of this year, Paramount announced that the summer’s fourth season would be its last. The season, which will end in August, will feature four bonus episodes in order to wrap up the show’s plot in lieu of a fifth season.

In April, in anticipation of the release of the fourth season on Paramount+, Netflix began streaming the show’s first two seasons on its platform. The show became a hit, reaching number two in the Nielsen ratings and juicing the viewership numbers for new episodes on Paramount+. Here is a show, made with great reverence to the traditions of network TV, that clearly became a casualty of that network’s foolish speculation in the streaming marketplace. A show picking up viewers on its march to the grave.

I don’t know whether to find this show’s short, full life in the midst of all this mess inspiring or depressing. Evil could just as easily be a prophecy of TV’s future as a relic of its wasted past. As both a masterful exercise in the form of the classic network procedural and a narratively risky attempt to tell an enormous story about the fallibility of humankind, Evil fits this era like an oversize crucifix jammed into an elementary school hallway. “The world is weird,” David tells Ben early in the series. He wasn’t kidding.