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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.

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. “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. 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.

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