An under-the-radar gem, Michelle and Robert King’s Evil concluded with its fourth season last year. Kudos to Paramount Plus for giving them four extra episodes to bring a satisfying close to this inventive, unpredictable series.
Evil tracks the adventures of a Catholic Church-sponsored “assessor” team for investigating potentially supernatural incidents that may have religious causes or ramifications. Father David Acosta (Mike Colter) comes at each problem from a spiritual mindset, Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) from a psychological one, and Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) a scientific one. Over the course of the series, these three decidedly different people develop a close rapport as they bring their diverse experiences and beliefs to bear on each weird situation.
As ever, the structural approach in season four is a hybridization of weekly casework and gradually accumulating lore. While the speculative elements of the monster-of-the-week scenarios can be uneven, they nicely vary the milieu, enabling a revolving door of perfectly deployed guest stars (always a King show hallmark). But it’s in the throughlines that Evil continuously improves itself, both in its wildly unpredictable world-building, its mastery of horror-comedy tone, and the winning friendship of the main characters. The primary thread involves the evil scheme of Dr. Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson) to breed the antichrist using Kristen’s stolen egg, but there are others: the rebellious attempts of Kristen’s mother Sheryl (Christine Lahti) to rise to power within Leland’s evil coproration, David’s involvement with “the Vatican CIA,” the mind-control subversion of Kristen’s husband Andy (Patrick Brammall), the comical fearlessness of the demon-detecting Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), and Ben’s struggles to disprove the hauntings of a djinn. These plots and subplots don’t exactly add up to a coherent, perfectly shaped arc, but in this show’s case, lack of perfect shape isn’t remotely a drawback. A huge part of the fun is the show’s unmitigated embrace of the unexpected — not just in its focus on the paranormal, but on the expectations of episodic television. Surprise is crucial to horror, but it’s also crucial to humor; Evil knows this, and combines the two into something utterly unique, never afraid to experiment with surprise in its content, its interweaving of classic supernatural tropes with the mundane evils of contemporary life, and its subversion of media forms and expectations.
To say Evil ended perfectly from a narrative perspective would be going too far. The series finale is even a bit anticlimactic, story-wise. But the closure is nonetheless satisfying, because it focuses so keenly on the principals’ relationship, and how the closing down of the assessor program draws them together emotionally. Herbers, Colter, and Mandvi are just so incredibly likable together, and everyone who comes into their orbit more than holds their own. (Emerson, especially, is a delight in these later seasons; he looks like he’s having the most fun of his career.) For a show that started fairly conventionally, Evil developed into something uniquely memorable; it’s a shame it didn’t get more attention and success.
