A confession: I haven’t intentionally watched a network TV show in many, many years. Like so many people, I’ve turned my back on wholesome “normie” television to dwell among the seven hills of Babylon: HBO, HBO Max, Showtime, Netflix, FX on Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Disney+. Seduced by their pomp and glitter, their scandalizing nudity and mephitic profanity, their serpentine B-plots and diabolical moral ambiguities, I‘ve forgotten how to enjoy a squarely low-middlebrow entertainment—one full of flaccid humor, actors who look as scrubbed and generic as their professional headshots, and dialogue so stilted that you can all but see the script pages while you listen to it. I’ve strayed far from good shepherds such as Dick Wolf and Chuck Lorre.
As a lapsed network viewer, I was reluctant to return to our old national church, but having exhausted the alternatives, it was time to come to Jesus, or, in this case, CBS. With Halloween approaching, I couldn’t resist investigating the new paranormal procedural Evil.
Kristen Bouchard (Westworld’s Katja Herbers), an embattled forensic psychologist, pairs up with David Acosta (Mike Colter of Marvel properties Jessica Jones and Luke Cage), a seminarian employed by the Catholic Church to verify or dismiss purported miracles, demonic possessions, and other reality-warping supernatural phenomena. Their sidekick, or perhaps third wheel, is Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi), a tech expert and tenacious skeptic, like the Amazing Randi in a Geek Squad van.
This setup owes an enormous debt to a bona fide network classic, The X-Files, both in its believer-skeptic dialectic and in its will-they-or-won’t-they sexual tension. (As in the fantastic second season of Fleabag, the chemistry between a man of the cloth and a woman of the world turns out to be vastly more engaging than, say, a kinda-forbidden workplace romance.) In fact, Evil owes debts all over town: to The Exorcist, naturally, but also to The Last Exorcism, in which a would-be debunker gets barbecued by satanic cultists, to A Nightmare on Elm Street, as an obscenely trash-talking incubus begins to plague Kristen’s dreams, and to the real-life ghost-busting couple, Ed and Lorraine Warren, of The Conjuring and its sequels.
But the most significant debt here is to the Catholic Church, which arguably has done more heavy lifting for the horror genre than lunatic asylums, summer camps, and Ed Gein’s mother combined. The Church’s more outré traditions, its often frightening iconography (you can’t beat the Legenda aurea for gory martyrdoms), and its unnerving insistence that death is not the end all lend Evil an extra bit of heft and gravitas.
What prevents Evil from feeling derivative is that it explores, with more depth than network TV typically manages, the struggles of the sincerely religious and the doggedly agnostic alike. Kristen, one of whose four daughters may succumb to a heart defect, angrily contemplates theodicy. Her attraction to David vies with and is amplified by her feelings about her absent husband, a mountain guide on Mount Everest. She demands to know if, or how, David can rationalize the Church’s abuses. David wrestles with temptation, and not just the carnal kind: He’s been using psychedelics to “help along” his communion with God. Frantic parents kill their ostensibly possessed son after he tries to drown his baby sister. Can they be forgiven? Were they right?
A Catholic organization called the National Legion of Decency used to rate productions like this “C” (condemned) or “O” (morally offensive). Yet Evil’s willingness to acknowledge questions and ambiguities without preaching about them—either to the choir or to the damned—is respectful and a major part of its appeal.
Evil is hokey at times, particularly in its dialogue and comic relief, but its stories are well-wrought and thoughtfully paced. The show excels at misdirection. When the gang debunks, the explanations are inventive. An infernal whisper emanates from a faulty dishwasher hookup. A man “sweating blood” has infected hair plugs. When a character seems, impossibly, to know specific details of Kristen’s nightmares, he turns out to have stolen her therapist’s notes. Sometimes a case yields evidence not of supernatural evil but of the terrestrial kind, like racially biased medical practices. And often, a satisfying rational explanation (a corrupted piece of digital surveillance footage, for instance) gives way to an even deeper paranormal mystery.
As with Law & Order, whose detectives and lawyers are forever trotting out the most rudimentary legal concepts for the audience’s benefit, Evil has its share of clumsy psychiatric and theological shop talk. But even these discussions of cognitive bias, of why humans are so susceptible to misinterpreting what they don’t understand, can be fascinating. Evil gets a lot of mileage out of the low-octane spookiness we all experience: odd coincidences and people knowing things they shouldn’t or saying things of which they can’t know the true, secret significance.
Evil has characters with compelling personal stories: loss and doubt in David’s case, family and professional trials in Kristen’s, a stubborn hatred of deception, dishonesty, and woo-woo in Ben’s. And the occasionally hammy performances that a network procedural all but requires are improved by the fact that these actors—particularly the evil psychologist, Dr. Leland Townsend (played with weaselly malice by Michael Emerson)—are clearly enjoying the hell out of themselves. Mandvi, with his Michael Keaton-ish world-weariness and wisecracks, stands in for all of us skeptics. His first question for a Chinese woman who claims to speak to God: Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself?
The show, in its own cheesy way, raises valuable questions about the nature of evil, about whether psychopathy and evil are interchangeable concepts, about whence either of them really comes. It does a fine job of dramatizing how ordinary people, religious and irreligious, reason their way to their beliefs and principles. Concepts such as C.S. Lewis’s “fake it till you make it” approach to faith are introduced with subtlety and even subverted into the service of disturbing plot points: Is a psychopath who learns to imitate human sentiments learning to be good or simply learning to deceive better?
Evil reminds a general audience, in an accessible way, that we should think about evil, about what can be known or falsified, and about what we’re doing here. And, perhaps more importantly, since this is TV and not theology, it offers its share of pretty good scares. There are performances by the possessed that would make Linda Blair proud and a steady accumulation of weirdness that helps Evil overcome the stamp of its lowly network origin. Rate this one “O” for “Order more Holy Water.”