Evil's Final Season May Be Michelle and Robert King's Crowning Achievement

How do you define Evil — not the concept, but the TV show? When it debuted on CBS (yes, CBS) back in 2019, Evil was pitched as an offbeat procedural, following a team of paranormal investigators hired by the Catholic Church to confirm or debunk reports of demonic activity. It was set up initially as a monster-of-the-week series, spiked with the sharp wit and social commentary familiar to fans of writer/producers Michelle and Robert King’s The Good Wife and The Good Fight.

As it rolls into its fourth and final season (which will include four “bonus episodes” to close everything out), Evil remains a procedural… sort of. Ever since it moved to Paramount+ for Season 2, the show has gotten darker, crazier, and more complex, while retaining a basic episodic structure. The heroes still chase a new demon nearly each week — but now they’re also dealing with much more.

If you haven’t watched Evil in a while (or ever), or if you just need a refresher on where we left off at the end of Season 3, here’s the situation:

The ostensible leader of our demon-tracking trio, Father David Acosta (Mike Colter), has been tapped by a super-secret Catholic organization, because of his frequent prescient visions. The team’s resident skeptic, the tech whiz Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi), is finding his default “there’s a scientific explanation for everything” position harder to cling to ever since demons started taking up residence in his apartment.

Then there’s the show’s main character: Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), a forensic psychologist who has landed at the center of a vast Satanic conspiracy. Her arch-nemesis, Dr. Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson), is a fellow forensic psychologist and a top-level executive at a mysterious corporation dedicated to making the world worse via social media trolling and soul-crushing distractions. Leland has recruited Kristen’s mother Sheryl (Christine Lahti) into the business and has hypnotized Kristen’s husband Andy (Patrick Brammall) into doing his bidding. He also tangles often with the Bouchards’ four daughters, trying — and mostly failing, hilariously — to bait them online. Oh and he’s stolen one of Kristen’s frozen eggs in a scheme to birth the antichrist.

Evil has more recurring characters, including Andrea Martin as a fearless, no-nonsense demon-fighting nun. But just as significant are the show’s accumulation of weird details, which the writers don’t even bother to explain any more: like the way Leland uses the song “Feliz Navidad” to send subliminal signals to his supplicants; or the way Kristen gulps down canned margaritas; or the Animal Crossing-like video game where Kristen’s daughters interact with Leland; or the way those daughters often talk simultaneously at high speed, in a dizzying rush of words.

There’s a sensibility to Evil — a little bit absurd and unapologetically cynical — that is common to the Kings’ shows, but has been cranked up higher here than it ever was in the Good franchise. (Evil is decidedly edgier than the Kings’ current CBS hit Elsbeth, a Good spin-off; in fact, it’s closest in tone to the producers’ short-lived political satire BrainDead.) Judging by the four Season 4 episodes sent to critics before this week’s premiere, the writers are pushing their premise as far toward the fringe as they can before the series finale later this summer.

Each Evil season has a theme of sorts, expressed in the storybook animations that precede the opening credits. (Those credits, which often appear as deep as 20 minutes into a 55-minute episode, are a marvel as well, with their stark black-and-white imagery and their warning that viewers who skip them “will be haunted.”) This season takes its cues from a scene in the premiere which sees Kristen ridding her home of everything that smacks of spiritualism, then replacing it all with the just-the-facts bestseller How Things Work. She’s done with woo-woo. It’s time to get back to good, old-fashioned science.

But there are more than a few ghosts still in the machine. In Season 4’s first adventure, the team investigates a particle accelerator that makes horrific otherworldly noises when active — and which may actually be opening a portal to Hell. Later, they look into a report of werewolves (in the vicinity of that accelerator, as it happens) that turn out to be robot dogs, illegally programmed to attack dark-skinned people. Then they head out to a hog farm (again, near the accelerator) producing pork products that seem to render its consumers vulnerable to possession. Typical of Evil, some folks eat the cursed chops and bacon on purpose, as a sort of TikTok challenge.

Meanwhile, Leland and his colleagues are celebrating the success of their “March Forward” program — moving the percentage of society on the way to damnation from 20 to 30 — and the devil baby on the way. Yet even in the woo-woo world, the earthly intrudes. Leland is regretting working with Sheryl, who keeps demanding more power and responsibility (something unheard of in the deeply misogynistic satanic culture). And when the demon-child is born, Leland quickly gets overwhelmed by the sheer volume of dirty diapers and puke-stained clothes.

The Kings’ shows have long had these shifts between big picture drama and the mundane day-to-day. (The high-powered lawyers in The Good Wife and The Good Fight would be arguing cases with huge implications for society one minute and then chilling out by watching pretentious prestige TV crime shows the next.) With Evil, the whole series has in a way been about the increasingly narrowing line between the fateful and the frivolous. Is there a nefarious conspiracy afoot to make us angrier at each other? Or are people being mean online just because they’re bored?

In its fourth season, Evil remains one of TV’s best-looking shows, with a remarkable attention to detail in the sets. Each of the character’s homes looks genuinely creepy, filled with deep shadows and eerie lights; and locations like the particle accelerator facility are suitably ominous and imposing. The Kings and their directors are big on using blocking and framing to create chillingly clean compositions — or for the sake of a good visual joke. (The best example of the latter is on Elsbeth, where the heroine regularly pops out from behind other characters or from the edge of the screen, right when her appearance would be funniest.) And the special effects department does an amazing job with Evil’s disgusting demons, with their distended bellies and dripping bodily fluids.

But the strength of this series remains its willingness to make direct connections between the free-floating crumminess of the modern world and the possibility that it stems from something ancient, malevolent and impossible to overcome. To paraphrase Kristen, when she and the boys commiserate at one point over how increasingly bizarre their assignments are getting: The world’s a crazy place and there are people trying to make it crazier so they can control us.

Evil finds this revelation more amusing than horrifying. More importantly: Even if the situation is hopeless, the protagonists and the creators of this show haven’t given up. They don’t stand on the sidelines and smugly shrug. They keep gathering up their demon-fighting tools and entering the fray, with a wry smile on their lips and a canned margarita at the ready.

Evil Season 4 premieres May 23 on Paramount+. Join the discussion about the show in our forums. 

Noel Murray is a freelance pop culture critic and reporter living in central Arkansas.