Evil - Season 1
“Evil centers a trio of religious minorities—an atheist, a Muslim, and a Catholic—whose heated but respectful debates form some of the show’s most compelling scenes.”
Title: Evil
Episodes Reviewed: Season 1
Creators: Michelle King 👩🏼🇺🇸 and Robert King 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Michelle King 👩🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Robert King 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Rockne S. O'Bannon 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Davita Scarlett 👩🏾🇺🇸 (2 eps), Dewayne Darian Jones 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Aurin Squire 👨🏾🇺🇸🌈 (2 eps), Patricia Ione Lloyd 👩🏾🇺🇸🌈 (2 eps), and various
Directors: Peter Sollett 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Robert King 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Ron Underwood 👨🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Gloria Muzio 👩🏼🇺🇸 (1 ep), Tess Malone 👩🏼🇺🇸🌈 (1 ep), and various
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
—MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 5/5
Network television likes to oversimplify, appealing to our basest instincts through shock or feel-good content that seeks only to stimulate the brain (and viewership.) But from the creators of The Good Wife, Michelle and Robert King prove that you can drive ratings without sacrificing nuance.
In their latest show, the CBS drama Evil revels in ambiguity, giving no satisfactory “explanations” for its episodic mysteries of demonic possessions or prophecies. As we follow a trio of experts deployed by the Catholic Church to investigate such unresolved oddities, Evil further casts doubt through unreliable narrators. Protagonist Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) and her partner David Acosta (Mike Colter), a priest-in-training, both travel between their conscious and subconscious minds like a kid waltzing past funhouse mirrors. What you see is never really what you get.
With the onus put on viewers to parse the screen, the Kings also prime us to think critically about our own realities. Unlike many of its peers, Evil is not an escapist tranquilizer. Rather, it makes us sit up and pay attention to its excavations of today’s issues like the current scourge of disinformation; the ease with which good people do bad things; or the intoxicating pull of right-wing extremism.
This cautionary tale rings with palpable urgency, but impressively, it retains a core of lightness and humor that makes for an addictive watch. For some, Evil may even provide comfort. With Americans growing increasingly tired of fighting each other, the Kings present us with coworkers who each subscribe to different belief systems—a devout Catholic, an atheist psychologist, and a Muslim hacker—and demonstrate how their clashing ideals only make them stronger as a team. It’s a powerful and gratifying message that stands out from the crowd.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Unlike other duos that pair believers with non-believers, such as Special Agent Mulder and Dr. Scully from The X-Files or Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan on Bones, Evil centers Dr. Kristen Bouchard as the unequivocal lead. Her teammates David, the direct liaison with the Catholic Church, and Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) who provides technology-based theories for the phenomena they come across, both enjoy varying levels of backstory and independence. But we follow Kristen the most and through all manner of angles whether it’s seeing her as a retired mountain climber or a mother of four rambunctious daughters, or even as a responsible person who occasionally uses recreational drugs. Her dimensionality goes on and on.
In particular, I love that other women complete Kristen’s orbit. Puncturing the exceptionalism we often see onscreen with women of science like the aforementioned doctors Scully and Brennan, Kristen never feels alone among a sea of men. Rather, strong women are everywhere, much as they are in reality. On the police force, Detective Mira Byrd (Kristen Connolly) shares information with Kristen as an old friend but they maintain professional distance when their interests conflict. In the courtroom, Judges Katrina Linden (Amy Hohn) and Sara Carl Shire (Jayne Houdyshell) each only see an episode apiece but contribute to the roll call of women in positions of power.
Perhaps the most telling proof of Evil’s balanced worldview occurs through the gender split of dialogue. In the season’s final three episodes, women speak for 51% of the time—helped in large part by the season finale, where women speak for three minutes to every two minutes we hear from men.
It’s so satisfying to watch a show that empowers women in STEM to be active participants, not just silent figureheads.
Race: 4.5/5
Even with this feminism, however, it must be noted that only the white women of Evil enjoy such levels of depth and screentime. While Evil never offends with its women of color, thanks to strong storytelling that gives even its antagonists believable motivations, none recur for more than two of the season’s 13 episodes.
At most, Grace Ling (Li Jun Li) plays a pivotal role as a potential prophet. When Kristen and team visit Grace at the behest of the Catholic Church, the authenticity of its New York City Chinatown setting feels striking, crafted with care down to the spoken Mandarin swapped between Chinese American characters—fluent, but with slight American accents.
By numbers, Black women comprise the majority of women of color on the show. While they remain largely unexplored and cast in either neutral or negative lights, it’s good to see sheer breadth. A sharp lawyer, Renée (Renée Elise Goldsberry) is the sister of David’s late girlfriend who tempts him into breaking his vow of celibacy. Esther (Nana Mensah), the new wife of David’s father, is slightly Othered as a much younger partner in a throuple but stays generally free of narrative judgment.
Unfortunately, other Black women do appear as slight antagonists: Caroline (Karen Pittman) receives a botched exorcism and tries to sue the Catholic Church. In another episode, David’s old friend Sonia (Emayatzy Corinealdi) holds him and another Black man hostage, even if she does so for sympathetic reasons. Evil clearly has room to develop its women of color and should ensure Black women, in particular, see more overtly positive roles in future episodes.
On the other hand, the show easily elevates men of color through an ensemble cast that feels believably New-York-City-diverse. As a dark-skinned Black man in a leading role, Colter’s David automatically rejects the colorism that suffuses much of mainstream television. Meanwhile, Ben, played by Mumbai-born Mandvi who is British-American, pleasantly shows how easy it is to subvert stereotypes through depth of character alone.
Specifically, Ben’s role as an abrasive tech whiz with little luck in love could easily have been mishandled, considering media’s propensity for casting Asian actors as desexualized nerds. But key scenes build a bridge that crosses major pitfalls: Ben gets humanized through a romantic subplot with ghost hunter Vanessa (Nicole Shalhoub) that spans at least two episodes, for starters. And while Ben’s character does have room to grow—he often feels like an errand boy for David and Kristen, jumping to complete their tasks—he thankfully asserts himself at least once, when he tells David that he isn’t available to swing by because of a prior engagement. The power of seeing him set boundaries goes a long way and I hope it only strengthens next season.
LGBTQ: 2.25/5
The series boasts queer writers, takes place in New York City, and was filmed entirely on location, but surprisingly little diversity of sexuality and gender makes it into the story. In fact, the only instance we see takes place upstate in "2 Fathers" (Season 1, Episode 8), when Kristen and David visit an artist who has been using a Satanic sigil in his artwork. The artist also happens to be David’s estranged father, Leon (Vondie Curtis-Hall). Upon introduction, we find out that he is happily remarried and in a throuple with two much younger women, Esther and Cori (Jenn Colella).
It’s good to see that Cori is played authentically by queer actor Colella, who told Out in 2017 that she was in a polyamorous relationship with a married man and woman—precisely the situation we see in Evil. However, polyamory does get Othered on the show as the throuple is seen through the eyes of Kristen and David who view it as something surprising. It doesn’t help that Leon, Esther, and Cori get lumped into a hedonistic bacchanal of art, drugs, and ritualistic chanting and dancing, as Esther summons ghosts for a seance. But the mood of the party stays celebratory and fun, showing Evil’s skill at throwing assumptions out the window. Ultimately, the queer representation winds up feeling a little sensationalized, but only because it’s so isolated without other examples woven into the show’s many storylines.
Some subtext does exist between Kristen and Mira, as flagged by Katja Herbers herself after she read an earlier version of this review. 🙏 Upon revisiting the scene in question, when Kristen and Mira hang out at the climbing gym in “Vatican 3” (Season 1, Episode 7), some serious eye-fucking indeed takes place. And both women sure can rock a suit. But as far as I can tell, the writing never explicitly confirms either Kristen or Mira as queer. I hope they’re saving it for Season 2!
Bonus for Religion: +1.00
Evil centers a trio of professionals who each hail from different religious minorities. Their heated but respectful debates form some of the show’s most compelling scenes, aided perhaps by the Kings’ own experience in such matters. Robert, a practicing Catholic married to Michelle, an agnostic Jew, tells The New York Times, “I wanted characters who had very different points of view on these subjects to be able to listen to each other respectfully, and they do throughout the series.”
Onscreen and among the core trio, Ben Shakir is Muslim. He’s authentically played by Mandvi whose family is Dawoodi Bohra Muslim. While his character fervently subscribes to secularism, as Ben scoffs at supernatural theories with more derision than the team’s atheist, Kristen, we learn that others in the Shakir family practice their faith. Ben’s sister Karima (Sohina Sidhu) appears in two separate episodes wearing hijab but is defined more by her tech savviness, as the person Ben goes to when he gets stuck on a problem. And in one of their conversations, Karima makes an offhand comment about how their father is praying. It’s wonderful to see varying levels of piety within one Muslim household.
In addition, Catholics make up just 1 in 5 Americans but the religion forms the bedrock of the show as David, Kristen, and Ben are all employed by the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, only a quarter of the country calls itself atheist but Kristen never hesitates to refer to herself as one.
Mediaversity Grade: A- 4.44/5
I haven’t sped through a series like this in ages. Evil’s mastery of ambiguity feels so appealing in a world that prefers to yell in black and white, that I simply couldn’t look away.
11/12/2020: Updated LGBTQ category
Like Evil? Try these films that feature the occult.
Atlantics (2019)
Savage State (2020)
Hereditary (2018)