honestly for me the biggest curve ball in evil was when sheryl said leland wasn't the first demon she dated. like what?? i didn't see it coming but it sure does make sense
One of the things I enjoy immensely about the Netflix series Evil is that it's never quite clear whether Sheryl Luria (Christine Lahti) is operating under diabolical influence, is running a long con against the forces of Hell, or is truly corrupt and evil herself, or some combination of the three. The way the series walks that line is *chef's kiss*.
Look, as I’m rewatching all of Evil to prevent withdrawals (it’s not working, for the record), I’m reminded of how much I fucking despise Sheryl.
Like even knowing what happens to her in the end does not redeem her. She’s a crappy grandma who doesn’t pay attention to her grandkids in the way that they need, she lies to them, and she literally wants their father dead. She was legit gonna let the guys just kill Andy and the only reason they didn’t is because she realized that the girls knew Leland was pretending to be Andy.
Like I can recognize that her character is interestingly written and I understand the purpose she serves for the narrative, but, like…
I despise her. More than Leland. At least Leland doesn’t pretend he’s doing everything for a good reason—he’s unapologetic about his choices to help evil. I dunno. Maybe I’m blinded by the pretty blue eyes behind the glasses.
Five years ago, I chose three network shows to follow and gather articles about them as they aired. I had been doing massive round ups and summaries of articles about the ends of the series’s. (I started and never finished ones for Pose, Schitt’s Creek and Brooklyn 99. I haven’t rewatched or reread any of the articles so I probably never will.) It was a lot of work, and then two of the shows I chose to follow from their start were canceled. Evil, the best of them, was the only one that remained. Eventually I mostly stopped looking for articles about it, and I switched to this format of trying to write a personal review of everything that I watch. There also seemed to be less articles about television than there were five years ago? Or at least covering fewer shows . While watching the final season I would click on links for articles like “Best Shows Streaming Right Now” and not see it listed. Only then weeks later I’d find an article about Evil being extremely underrated. Also before the final season, the first two seasons were put on Netflix, and got a larger audience than ever before. So maybe someone will find my guides to writings about the show from its first seasons and thank me for putting it all together?
I will miss this show, it’s been a favorite. I am also kind of angry that there two years between seasons due to real world events. I wish the Kirsten’s daughters’ growth spurts weren’t so obvious, or at least that the show did time jumps to explain them.
I went into the season with mixed feelings about what resolution could mean in a series that relied so much on ambiguity. During the second season, I felt like plots were being weighted to the supernatural explanation of events. This really irritated me at the time because I liked the ability to choose a non supernatural option. But this season felt like it reintroduced this possibility in the way that it emphasized how people working with Leland and Sheryl are in some shared fantasy. Are they actually bringing the anti-Christ into the world? Who knows, but they are all deeply invested in it being true, as well as the “fact” that they work with demons in human skin suits. This allowed me to relax and enjoy the demon design, how they all had names like George and Lou, and not worry about how “real” they were.
This shared fantasy interpretation is kind of poignant with Sheryl’s character. She got involved with all this because she’s angry over the mistreatment in the patriarchal world the Church supports. She liked the idea of destroying that world so much that she ignored all the signs that what she was trading it for was equally sexist and violent until it was too late. On the flip side, Leland seeing his initially slovenly and incompetent attorney as a literal demon with past victims corpses attached to his body was funny.
Part way through the final season I had the realization that the show almost never shows the incident that they are investigating, and that feels revolutionary. It is necessary for maintaining ambiguity about what happened. But also it’s a way to keep people aware that Evil is about how the case sets off reflections amongst the three protagonists. It’s a reminder that this is about subjective experiences, not what happened.
Speaking of subjective experiences, for some reason I thought Ben’s story with the jinn started in the previous season. Someday I will rewatch this whole series and make clear why I thought this, but even with this, the story was fascinating. The way Ben approached it, through various scientific tests and eventually embracing some unscientific associations in his solution, including a real tin foil hat.
The final four episodes kicked off Anna Chlumsky claiming she’s Kristen’s daughter Laura from the future. Only it’s more like that she is a woman Andy is having an affair with in his very expensive rehab facility. But some of her tales from the future are really apocalyptic, and they do lead to attempted murder of children. (Here I am going to share an unpopular opinion. I love the daughters and the ways they talk over each other, even if I barely bothered to learn their names consistently.)
Richard Kind also appears in some of the last episodes. His presence make me think about how A Serious Man is probably a predecessor to Evil, tone wise, keeping the audience not knowing if what’s suggested is real. Then his character did something so shocking I didn’t know what to make of it.
At one point in my note taking I wrote “Finally a plot that in “ and I have no idea what this was in reference. Maybe the deconsecration of the Church scene. I really had never thought about the process of deconsecration. In fact I think the last time was when I was a college student and read Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal. In that novel the title character and narrator is telling his story from his current job at a library in a deconsecrated church. When reading on my own I assumed that this meant that literature is the new sacredness. But then the teacher pointed out that Pirandello was a nihilist, and this was a way he expressed that. My interpretation showed my lack of Catholic grounding. The scenes on Evil felt like they were substituting that lack. (I have no interest in ever rereading The Late Mattia Pascal because I remember it as an unpleasant read, but other works of Pirandello feel really relevant to these days.)
As I started this series saving articles about it in this commenting/scrapbooking kind of way, it feels fitting that I end it like that too. So here are eight articles I found and read between the show’s final episodes and now.
First is “The Genius of Evil” by Phillip Maciak in The New Republic. It does cover that affect from being raised Catholic, as well as an appreciation of how being goofy is an essential aspect of its spiritual search. It also discusses the Kings work at large, the show as both a throw back to the procedural TV and forward looking in into ambiguity. The article takes time to discuss trends in tv, network vs. cable vs. streaming, and how difficult it is for something like this to find a large audience.
After the finale found this Collider article by Lloyd Farley declaring the season three episode the "Demon of Algorithms" the series’s most shocking episode. The essay also works as a recap of Sheryl’s arc. I really wish there was more of the aftermath of that on screen.
The final season upped the number of the demons and other creatures that appeared on screen. There was some bonus material on Paramount+ about the creature design after the episodes. And here is an interview with Joel Harlow by Mark Peikert in IndieWire. I didn’t really know anything about his career before but it’s a good read.
At The New Yorker current critic Inkoo Kang wrote praises for its spiritual depth, humor and distinctive voice, saying it's like nothing else on television. I am not sure I would say that it’s like nothing else on television. Firstly, there is more television out there than anyone can see or really be aware of. Second I think the (admittedly, already cancelled when this was published) Shining Vale had a lot in common with Evil on a tonal level, though the characters are less explicitly searching for something spiritual. Thirdly, SurrealEstate getting a third season means that there is another unconventional twist on the sci-if/fantasy procedural out there. Tonally I don’t think these two shows have much in common, but both of their recent seasons ended with characters moving to work for the Vatican, so I want to highlight that. I will do a post about SurrealEstate around the end of third season.
Joshua Rivera wrote about the show for The Ringer. Some instances of his arcticle that I disagree with such as that the final episode were angry because the work wasn’t done. (I think the show knew well enough that the work couldn’t be done.) But it also has this quote that I wish I had articulated: “Leland, for all his efforts to corrupt our heroes and bring forth the Antichrist, was never really a foe to vanquish so much as he was a meddler, muddying the waters until he was the only thing visible in them.”
Near the finale the Michelle and Robert King gave an interview to Slate’s Rebecca Onion. They discuss how the first two seasons became successful on Netflix just as it was canceled by Parmount+. They discuss the appeal of shallowness and how that informs how the audience sees certain characters, and leave open the possibility of being picked up again sometime in the future.
After the series wrapped up, Trent Moore at IndieWire wrote about it as a perfect Halloween binge. The article makes repeated general references to The X-Files, which is obvious and kind of misleading. I have followed multiple series that fall under the science fiction/fantasy procedural sub genre, but a lot of people don’t. They may like one, but that’s an exception. Further more, through my very unscientific method of observation of Reddit threads, when there are what to watch after TXF, Evil is rarely mentioned and when it is there are people who tried it and couldn’t believe its tone was on purpose. As someone who grew up with TXF and greatly enjoyed getting to see Kristin Bouchard do things Dana Scully would never be allowed, I get how much of a whiplash going from one show to the other can be. (Even if I haven’t rewatched any TXF since 2015, and don’t intend to unless there are no new sci-fi/supernatural procedurals that I like on the air.)
Finally, I’m including this TVLine year end round up where they put it on the list of most unjust cancellations of the year. (It was on some of their other year in review lists, too.) It had a pretty good ending but it was unjustly fast.
