Evil Said It All

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the series finale of Evil, "Fear of the End."]

No one on TV talks like they did on Evil. Conversations on Evil had substance; characters spoke about, as Katja Herbers' Kristen Bouchard put it in one episode, "everything from God to death to how to be." They disagreed respectfully; they confessed pain and doubts; they were despairing but hopeful. It was beautiful. In the midst of all the silly, mundane demons that populated the world of the show — and maybe because of them — Evil had some of the most sincere, intelligent dialogue on television. "Nobody talks like that anymore, about real things," Kristen said in the series finale. "It's all about influencers and TV." 

Evil talked about influencers (in a memorable Season 1 episode, one of them peddled a demonic Christmas song) and TV (an early joke in which Kristen's youngest daughter gently corrected "TV show" to "streaming show" got even better once Evil moved from CBS to Paramount+ in Season 2). Evil lived in the world. It was just too transcendent to stay there. A few times throughout the series, the main characters, whose job was to study the demonic, met with artists who rejected the concept of their work, arguing that there was no such thing as good or evil in art. It was funny coming from Robert and Michelle King, also the creators of The Good Wife and The Good Fight, whose most acclaimed shows have good or evil in their titles. But it also presented the series with something like an identity crisis. If art is at odds with questions of morality, how do you make a TV show like Evil?

If you're the Kings, you make it a procedural. Evil packed psychological horror, goofy humor, and earnest contemplation into a case-of-the-week format: Priest and sometime visionary David (Mike Colter), skeptical psychologist Kristen, and science guy Ben (Aasif Mandvi) investigated cases of potential demonic possession on behalf of the Catholic Church. The familiarity of the show's basic structure, in which essentially good people searched for answers, gave some shape to the vastness of their spiritual pursuit — or, maybe, made it even more unsettling, since there were often no answers to find. 

This gave Evil a provocative tension. Religious uncertainty was mirrored in systemic instability. From the beginning, the show engaged with real-world problems alongside supernatural ones; whether the demons were literal demons or metaphors for human weakness, it was impossible to separate them from the illnesses corrupting society. Yet while order seemed to be breaking down, the series was entirely comfortable in a genre that typically trusts authority. At its core, Evil still wanted to believe. Coupled with its sly sense of humor, Evil's total confidence in being a procedural also made it feel playful, like it grasped TV's full potential better than all the wannabes aiming for prestige. As Phillip Maciak recently wrote for The New Republic, "When you don't expend any energy trying to transcend the genre, you can transcend all manner of other things instead."

Season 1 aired on CBS, after a comedy block anchored by Young Sheldon. It was undeniably cool right off the bat, serving up haunting, surreal images that stuck to the viewer like night terrors: a demon therapist, a possessed Broadway producer, so many creepy kids. When it was sent to Paramount+ for Season 2, Evil lost some of the comedy that was inherent to its existence on broadcast television, but in exchange, it gained the chance to define itself on its own terms. Evil leaned into the language of streaming, finding creative ways to be a little more profane without abandoning its roots.

In a sense, the show saw its end coming. Everything that happened to Evil — which moved from broadcast television to the wilds of streaming, and which was canceled this season before its time — was echoed in its fears about technology, unreliable institutions, and an unfair universe. When the series was granted four bonus episodes to wrap up the story, maybe that small win spoke to what faith it had left. Still, the writers didn't hold back. On screen, the church shut down the assessor program, and the characters lost their jobs. The parallels to Evil's situation were clear. "I thought we were successful," Ben said. David replied, "We were. I don't think it matters anymore."

Even so, the show was a riot. Evil even had sick fun with being canceled; the opening credits of the first bonus episode made a little joke about it. The whole show seemed to be driven by a lesson that the valiant nun Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin) shared with David when he began hurting himself in the hopes of seeing God: "Pain is for tourists." There was no glory in artificial suffering. For every nightmarish apparition, Evil had a silly joke; witness, for example, the succubus with a retainer, or Kristen running around a silent monastery where she had possibly released a demon while wearing a shirt that said, "Boy, do I hate being right all the time!" Not enough shows about weird things are willing to get suitably weird. Evil delivered. It understood that after opening the gates of hell, the best move is to cut to Wallace Shawn saying, "Well, that is odd."

ALSO READ: Evil's Katja Herbers talks finding 'amusement within the horror of it all' in the series finale

The cast nailed the show's off-kilter tone, dancing from comedy to a creeping sense of doom. Mike Colter brought elegance and nobility to one of the most soulful men on TV. Aasif Mandvi took what could have been a standard role as the funny, dependable sidekick and imbued him with conflicted humanity. And Katja Herbers gave a remarkable, raw, fearless performance as a woman on the edge, a mother whose protectiveness was so all-consuming it opened her up to possession. Kristen's tendency to be amused by her own problems made her an anchor for the show, grounding both Evil's seriousness and its wry sense of humor. 

Evil's last act on broadcast television was murder; at the end of the first season, Kristen killed a serial killer who was threatening her daughters. After taking his life, she burned her hand on a rosary, and the second season, the show's tightest and most thrilling, dove into her torment as she wrestled with the state of her soul. The only absolution the world offered her was sickening; in an audacious move, Evil implicated Kristen for the white privilege that kept her out of jail when her cop friend let the murder slide. She and audiences were left to wonder whether there was any system of punishment or forgiveness that could still be trusted.

The Good Wife and The Good Fight were legal dramas with biased arbiters; the judges on those series were characters with just as many flaws as everyone else. Evil, with its prejudiced cops and, late in the series, crooked judges, had the same outlook on matters of earthly law and order, but it also extended the Kings' worldview into another realm. What if the judges of the universe were just as arbitrary? What if demons were ordinary guys? Slimy antagonist Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson, clearly having a ball) was both devilish and dad-like, a pathetically unremarkable man whose demonic friends had all-American names like George. The final episodes put Leland on trial, only to reveal that his diabolical lawyer, also a demon, had rigged the game in his favor. Justice was spiritually corrupt, and it was being run by the supernatural equivalent of incels.

Even Sister Andrea, Evil's most devout voice, saw demons but could not see God. The Kings have often cited Charles Laughton's 1955 black-and-white thriller The Night of the Hunter as a major influence on Evil's visual style, which points to the heavens, framing the characters beneath empty space. In a behind-the-scenes feature from the fourth season, director of photography Fred Murphy explained, "We're into more space around the characters, to give space for the angel world above the characters." Angels on Evil were as likely to be visions of terror as they were to be visions of wonder, and what came down from on high could be dangerous, too. (Robert King told Entertainment Weekly during Season 1 that Kristen's house was situated under a train so that the characters were "looking above for a threat.") But it mattered that while demons ran rampant, the angel world was defined by the unseen.

Evil tapped into the power of what was absent — this was where the horror, the romance, and the religious longing of the show overlapped. For all its refined dialogue, it was just as striking in moments of silence, particularly between David and Kristen, whose forbidden attraction to one another crackled with everything they couldn't say. When their relationship crossed the line, it was in a fit of emotion: In the second season finale, the newly ordained David took Kristen's confession as she came clean about the murder, and then silent passion took over and they kissed. This, finally, was a meaningful form of absolution. The ritual of confession became a metaphor for the literal act of kissing and making up.

ALSO READ: Evil creators Robert and Michelle King on the series finale's last twist

In the end, the morality of murder became Evil's favorite debate; even David considered taking Leland's life. But the series finale rightly reserved the final showdown with its villain for Kristen. When she nearly strangled Leland to death, after so many seasons of his harassment, exploitation, and violation, it was easy to want her to finish the job. But Evil was more challenging than that; it expected audiences to remember the soul. Like the best of the prestige dramas it deserves to be listed alongside, it felt the heavy weight of moral compromise, and it took that seriously. And in denying viewers the most obvious form of TV catharsis — killing the bad guy — Evil found an ending for Leland that was brighter and funnier than any death could have been.

Leland's fate was the finale's smartest gag. The gang returned to the silent monastery last seen in the mostly wordless episode "S Is for Silence," which will be remembered as one of Evil's best. They stuffed Leland in a cabinet that, according to legend, once housed a demon, and left him under the watchful eye of Sister Andrea. He lived as a demon, so he was punished like one. As the cast and creators of Evil continue to make the case for the show's resurrection, it doesn't hurt that keeping Leland alive leaves more storytelling possibilities on the table if the series ever returns. But it's difficult to think of a more poetic, humiliating life sentence than eternal silence for a character who seemed capable of talking his way out of anything.

Kristen, meanwhile, learned a new language. The series' last move was to send Kristen and David to Rome to jump-start an assessor program for the Vatican. Their final scene was loud, filled with her daughters' lively overlapping dialogue — one of the show's warmest joys. Evil, once again, adapted to change. But there was one thing no one talked about. When Kristen's son, the baby Leland had schemed his way into fathering in the hopes of raising him as the Antichrist, revealed that he still had a demonic side, Kristen kept that twist from David. Evil signed off staring into the face of trouble and making peace with it. It was odd. What else was there to say? 

The series finale of Evil is now streaming on Paramount+.