TV Discussion : Evil - new supernatural series on CBS starring Mike "Luke Cage" Colter UPDATE: 4TH & FINAL SEASON!
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
i see ur point show is cancelled anyway lol
Cold as ice bro.
i mean we can speculate
but it will be for nothing
the ending is good enough for me
why what was missing?
They had no choice to have plot holes because they are praying for Netflix to pick them up.
But if this is truly the end I'm okay with the ending overall.
yeha i feel the same way
i might cop let me think about it
On Television
By Inkoo Kang
August 23, 2024
“Evil” has always stood out for its uncommonly open approach to faith.Illustration by Xiao Hua Yang
Save this story
The version of Catholicism favored by David Acosta, one of the two protagonists of the delightfully unhinged religious procedural “Evil,” likely doesn’t exist. David (Mike Colter), a Black man who starts the series as a priest-in-training, is often let down by the Church’s ossified white leadership. But his more progressive faith is accompanied by rather medieval forms of devotion. He battles against demons, participates in exorcisms, and chases the high of a formative vision of God, even if he can now only achieve moments of transcendence with the assistance of psychedelics. The temporal dislocation of his calling creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, but, in David’s view, dedicating himself to the Church, for all its imperfections, may be his best chance at insuring that the world doesn’t go to Hell in a handbasket.
Popular culture seldom explores spirituality with much depth. “Evil,” which wraps up its four-season run this month, on Paramount+, always stood out for its uncommonly open approach to faith. But the show feels just as distinctive for its particular tonal mixture—at once spooky, horny, satirical, larkish, and eschatological. The effect is that of a philosopher in an exorcist’s trenchcoat. The series, which has recently found a larger audience on Netflix, follows David and his two nonreligious partners—Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), a criminal psychologist with experience evaluating the sanity of her interlocutors, and Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi), a self-taught generalist who moonlights as a debunker of the supernatural—as they look into potential cases of demonic possession around Queens, New York. It’s a brainchild of Robert and Michelle King, the married couple behind “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” and it shares those shows’ gimlet-eyed tech pessimism and interest in lives lived online. “Evil” ’s primary villain, Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson), encourages a dweeb who’s experienced romantic rejection to embrace inceldom, and charges a subordinate with running a troll farm whose mission is to keep people doomscrolling. Implanting despair requires a deft touch, Leland explains. “Kill people, take their children—you run the risk of them turning to God,” he says. Far better “to keep them nervous, unbound, focussing on all the bad things in the world.”
It’s to “Evil” ’s advantage that its plots veer between the serious and the seriously goofy. An episode about a nine-year-old boy whose parents suspect he’s trying to kill his baby sister is an early triumph; a later installment about the urban legend of an elevator that sends teen-agers to Hell is just as satisfying. The series regularly interrogates how people are incentivized to sin, especially when it gets them attention. But it also considers how we might expand our notion of spiritual evil to include, say, a priest’s earthly grief cutting him off from God, or the perpetuation of racism in its manifold forms. In one harrowing episode, David lands at a hospital and at the mercy of a nurse prone to drugging Black patients. During another case, when a white cop fatally shoots a Black woman, all three assessors scoff at the officer’s suggestion that a demon made him see a gun in her hand.
The Kings are perhaps the only TV creators working today who are able to make their procedurals feel authorial, and fans of their previous series will recognize their thematic preoccupations and deep bench of character actors, many of whom are from the theatre world. (Christine Lahti, who plays Kristen’s sexy, ethically flexible mother, Sheryl, can always be relied on to steal scenes.) But “Evil” is more than an intellectual exercise for its showrunners; its pursuit of questions of faith, in particular, seems decidedly personal. Ben, who grew up in a Muslim family but adheres to a strictly scientific world view, finds himself increasingly unmoored by the loss of tradition. An empiricist existence can’t provide answers to life’s greater mysteries—or closure with the deceased. Kristen, a lapsed Catholic, bristles at the ingrained bias against women within the Church and points out more than once that their caseload of persons acting unacceptably strange skews heavily female. She’s baffled that someone like David’s mentor, Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), would spend her days cleaning up after priests—men who are her spiritual inferiors—or choose to serve an institution so hostile to the idea of gender equality.
Video From The New Yorker
Swift Justice: A Taliban Courtroom in Session
Inevitably, the cases take a toll on each character’s sense of self. Ben grows depressed as he encounters phenomena he can’t explain away. David’s patience with the Church frays as it becomes clear that its reluctance to combat evil on a larger scale is a matter of will rather than resources. And Kristen reacts as many of us likely would after being confronted with atrocities on a routine basis: she’s consumed by righteous anger. A protective mother with four lively girls and a frequently absent husband (Patrick Brammall), she occasionally uses the language of female empowerment to justify her own acts of violence. It’s not always necessary to sign a pact with the Devil, like Leland did, to discover how powerful you can become by indulging in your worst impulses.
The “Evil” universe gradually broadens to encompass shadowy figures from the Vatican and an end-times prophetess who becomes imprisoned in a Chinese work camp. But the show’s complex mythology is most compelling when it’s grafted onto the domestic realm, roping in Kristen’s cacophonous daughters, whose shared bedroom is a frequent site of girlish chaos. In a larger arc, Kristen discovers that the I.V.F. clinic she used for one of her pregnancies may be a locus for demonic spawning. It’s a wacky, contemporary spin on “Rosemary’s Baby”—why inseminate one woman with the Devil’s seed when you could inseminate hundreds?—but it’s also an implicit commentary on the ever-present threats to women’s reproductive autonomy, from the satanists running the clinic to God Almighty himself.
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For all its existential queries and dark truths about human nature, “Evil” is also fun. It revels in supernatural absurdism, cheerfully mashing up the occult and the mundane: at one point, a succubus visits Ben and has to remove her dental retainer before engaging in . . . succubus activities. (The sex scenes are in line with a series about moral abandon—Leland’s bed literally catches fire when he seduces Sheryl—but the show gets a lot more emotional traction from the long-simmering, vow-threatening heat between David and Kristen.) There are clever reimaginings of archetypes and genre conventions, as well as a willingness to laugh at malefactors. During the investigation into the I.V.F. clinic, Kristen learns that one of her own eggs has been stolen and inseminated by Leland to create what he believes will be the Antichrist. It’s a gross violation—but she simply envisions her nemesis rousing himself out of bed at four in the morning to change the Antichrist’s diapers, then cracks up. “Good job,” she tells him. “You just fucked yourself.”
The new season wasn’t intended to be the last, and admittedly feels rushed as a result; major characters undergo life-altering events with little breathing room for viewers to take it all in. But the larger reason to mourn the end of “Evil” is that it portends the demise of other small, quirky, introspective shows like it, as the TV industry contracts and executives become even more risk-averse. After producing some truly bonkers series, “Evil” and “The Good Fight” among them, the Kings have moved on to “Elsbeth,” an appealing but comparatively generic “Good Wife” spinoff, on CBS. The duo seem to tip their hats to the tyranny of cost-saving in one of “Evil” ’s final episodes, in which the archdiocese decides to sell off the church that David and Andrea have called home. Nothing’s so holy that it can’t be sacrificed at the altar of Mammon. ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 2, 2024, issue, with the headline “Devil May Care.”
Mourning the End of “Evil,” a Show Like Nothing Else on Television
The Paramount+ procedural’s unusually serious treatment of faith—and delightfully absurdist take on almost everything else—made it a bright spot in an increasingly risk-averse TV landscape.By Inkoo Kang
August 23, 2024
“Evil” has always stood out for its uncommonly open approach to faith.Illustration by Xiao Hua Yang
Save this story
The version of Catholicism favored by David Acosta, one of the two protagonists of the delightfully unhinged religious procedural “Evil,” likely doesn’t exist. David (Mike Colter), a Black man who starts the series as a priest-in-training, is often let down by the Church’s ossified white leadership. But his more progressive faith is accompanied by rather medieval forms of devotion. He battles against demons, participates in exorcisms, and chases the high of a formative vision of God, even if he can now only achieve moments of transcendence with the assistance of psychedelics. The temporal dislocation of his calling creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, but, in David’s view, dedicating himself to the Church, for all its imperfections, may be his best chance at insuring that the world doesn’t go to Hell in a handbasket.
Popular culture seldom explores spirituality with much depth. “Evil,” which wraps up its four-season run this month, on Paramount+, always stood out for its uncommonly open approach to faith. But the show feels just as distinctive for its particular tonal mixture—at once spooky, horny, satirical, larkish, and eschatological. The effect is that of a philosopher in an exorcist’s trenchcoat. The series, which has recently found a larger audience on Netflix, follows David and his two nonreligious partners—Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), a criminal psychologist with experience evaluating the sanity of her interlocutors, and Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi), a self-taught generalist who moonlights as a debunker of the supernatural—as they look into potential cases of demonic possession around Queens, New York. It’s a brainchild of Robert and Michelle King, the married couple behind “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” and it shares those shows’ gimlet-eyed tech pessimism and interest in lives lived online. “Evil” ’s primary villain, Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson), encourages a dweeb who’s experienced romantic rejection to embrace inceldom, and charges a subordinate with running a troll farm whose mission is to keep people doomscrolling. Implanting despair requires a deft touch, Leland explains. “Kill people, take their children—you run the risk of them turning to God,” he says. Far better “to keep them nervous, unbound, focussing on all the bad things in the world.”
It’s to “Evil” ’s advantage that its plots veer between the serious and the seriously goofy. An episode about a nine-year-old boy whose parents suspect he’s trying to kill his baby sister is an early triumph; a later installment about the urban legend of an elevator that sends teen-agers to Hell is just as satisfying. The series regularly interrogates how people are incentivized to sin, especially when it gets them attention. But it also considers how we might expand our notion of spiritual evil to include, say, a priest’s earthly grief cutting him off from God, or the perpetuation of racism in its manifold forms. In one harrowing episode, David lands at a hospital and at the mercy of a nurse prone to drugging Black patients. During another case, when a white cop fatally shoots a Black woman, all three assessors scoff at the officer’s suggestion that a demon made him see a gun in her hand.
The Kings are perhaps the only TV creators working today who are able to make their procedurals feel authorial, and fans of their previous series will recognize their thematic preoccupations and deep bench of character actors, many of whom are from the theatre world. (Christine Lahti, who plays Kristen’s sexy, ethically flexible mother, Sheryl, can always be relied on to steal scenes.) But “Evil” is more than an intellectual exercise for its showrunners; its pursuit of questions of faith, in particular, seems decidedly personal. Ben, who grew up in a Muslim family but adheres to a strictly scientific world view, finds himself increasingly unmoored by the loss of tradition. An empiricist existence can’t provide answers to life’s greater mysteries—or closure with the deceased. Kristen, a lapsed Catholic, bristles at the ingrained bias against women within the Church and points out more than once that their caseload of persons acting unacceptably strange skews heavily female. She’s baffled that someone like David’s mentor, Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), would spend her days cleaning up after priests—men who are her spiritual inferiors—or choose to serve an institution so hostile to the idea of gender equality.
Video From The New Yorker
Swift Justice: A Taliban Courtroom in Session
Inevitably, the cases take a toll on each character’s sense of self. Ben grows depressed as he encounters phenomena he can’t explain away. David’s patience with the Church frays as it becomes clear that its reluctance to combat evil on a larger scale is a matter of will rather than resources. And Kristen reacts as many of us likely would after being confronted with atrocities on a routine basis: she’s consumed by righteous anger. A protective mother with four lively girls and a frequently absent husband (Patrick Brammall), she occasionally uses the language of female empowerment to justify her own acts of violence. It’s not always necessary to sign a pact with the Devil, like Leland did, to discover how powerful you can become by indulging in your worst impulses.
The “Evil” universe gradually broadens to encompass shadowy figures from the Vatican and an end-times prophetess who becomes imprisoned in a Chinese work camp. But the show’s complex mythology is most compelling when it’s grafted onto the domestic realm, roping in Kristen’s cacophonous daughters, whose shared bedroom is a frequent site of girlish chaos. In a larger arc, Kristen discovers that the I.V.F. clinic she used for one of her pregnancies may be a locus for demonic spawning. It’s a wacky, contemporary spin on “Rosemary’s Baby”—why inseminate one woman with the Devil’s seed when you could inseminate hundreds?—but it’s also an implicit commentary on the ever-present threats to women’s reproductive autonomy, from the satanists running the clinic to God Almighty himself.
Advertisement
For all its existential queries and dark truths about human nature, “Evil” is also fun. It revels in supernatural absurdism, cheerfully mashing up the occult and the mundane: at one point, a succubus visits Ben and has to remove her dental retainer before engaging in . . . succubus activities. (The sex scenes are in line with a series about moral abandon—Leland’s bed literally catches fire when he seduces Sheryl—but the show gets a lot more emotional traction from the long-simmering, vow-threatening heat between David and Kristen.) There are clever reimaginings of archetypes and genre conventions, as well as a willingness to laugh at malefactors. During the investigation into the I.V.F. clinic, Kristen learns that one of her own eggs has been stolen and inseminated by Leland to create what he believes will be the Antichrist. It’s a gross violation—but she simply envisions her nemesis rousing himself out of bed at four in the morning to change the Antichrist’s diapers, then cracks up. “Good job,” she tells him. “You just fucked yourself.”
The new season wasn’t intended to be the last, and admittedly feels rushed as a result; major characters undergo life-altering events with little breathing room for viewers to take it all in. But the larger reason to mourn the end of “Evil” is that it portends the demise of other small, quirky, introspective shows like it, as the TV industry contracts and executives become even more risk-averse. After producing some truly bonkers series, “Evil” and “The Good Fight” among them, the Kings have moved on to “Elsbeth,” an appealing but comparatively generic “Good Wife” spinoff, on CBS. The duo seem to tip their hats to the tyranny of cost-saving in one of “Evil” ’s final episodes, in which the archdiocese decides to sell off the church that David and Andrea have called home. Nothing’s so holy that it can’t be sacrificed at the altar of Mammon. ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 2, 2024, issue, with the headline “Devil May Care.”
“More ‘Evil'”: Stephen King Demands Resurrection Of Paramount+ Supernatural Series
After premiering on CBS in 2019 and transitioning to Paramount+, the streamer confirmed in February that 'Evil' would end with Season 4
deadline.com
Katja Herbers Reignites Campaign To Renew ‘Evil’ Following Stephen King’s Praise Of Paramount+ Series
Katja Herbers is renewing hope that Evil will get picked up for another season on Paramount+ following words of praise from Stephen King.
deadline.com
Ok didn't realize evil 4 was cancelled and not just the finale cause they wanted to end it.. make sense how it kinda abruptly ended with such an open amount of possible outcomes
they need to figure this shit out
before even creating a show deals should be ready then
ok we will air this here then after that u can stream it here
i think that will save a lot of shows
Bro I have talked to people who actually work in the business and nobody can explain this streaming sh*t to me in a way i can understand.
Yeah cause thats were the secret is. For fail and win. Like super cell was a good viewed show. But they aint gonna get that budget they actually deserve.lol.
One thing I do know is streaming is not just having a successful show. Its what does the show do for the streaming service. For example if evil is successful but people only watch that then evil is only good for evil fans. But if evil fans stay and watch 4 more other shows then evil is now a win for the streaming service.
That just one thing there many others the metrics is weird.
All this
Also u just need the right people. Super cell would never been made. If the black exect wasnt there. Its kinda crazy that that show was made in the first place if u think about it. Lolol
Yup!
That what I keep saying.
We need to not only make our own but be more involved in LEGAL, MANAGEMENT, PRODUCTION, CASTING, FINANCE AND DEVELOPMENT.
And SUPPORT OUR OWN PROJECTS
I'm tired of saying it.
And these so called fans are full of sh*t too.
Hype these projects up, don't pirate it, stream it, go to the theatre, tweet, tik tok Instagram etc etc
I even made my momma watch lol
She doesnt watch TV lol.
The other shit u said 100