CW: self-harm, psychological issues
AKA how off the rails can your show go?
I know I'm a little late to the party since the show ended like a year ago but Evil is an American show that ran for 4 seasons on CBS and Paramount+ from 2019-2024.
The show starts out as a grounded procedural about a team of investigators (2 skeptics and 1 priest) working for the catholic church who analyze how psychological, physiological and environmental conditions might convince people that they or someone they love is possessed by a demon. There is nothing supernatural in the first season of the show and every demon sighting is explained with trauma, dreams and hallucinations.
SPOILERS BELOW
spoiler
By the fourth and final season of the show, the priest is a super powered psychic assassin working for the catholic CIA who provide him GPS coordinates and it allows him to jump into people's minds, take over their bodies and make them kill themselves.
The catholic CIA is introduced in a storyline where a Chinese-American catholic prophet is deported to China and put in a slave labor camp because being Christian is illegal in China. It's also heavily implied that China is straight up run by the devil since the main devil worshipper on the show says the "weeger camps" are run by the devil. There's also an episode with a haunted toy store and the resolution is just that it's prisoners in a Chinese slave camp trying to send out messages in the toys. They pulled the story straight from the dumbass fake shoe message tweet.
The skeptic characters also stay skeptic to a ridiculous degree despite everything they witness in the later seasons. In one episode they fly from Rome to New York with a demonic box and the demonic box takes over the plane, blasts screams and stuff through the speaker system and almost crashes the plane. All of this stops when the priest pours holy water on it and it literally melts away in front of everyone. In the next episode the skeptics are back to "oh, you and your silly demons" like they didn't just see that shit.
I kinda hated the show by the end but at the same time I have some respect for just how ridiculous they managed to turn everything.
I had to watch this show with my mom. It was okay, but I really hate procedurals and "monster of the week" stories. The practical effects were great, especially for TV shows which have smaller budgets than films. There were too many different storylines going on creating serious implications for the world building.
It's definitely a Boomer show, written by Boomers for Boomers. The technobable was the worst part of it. So many episodes seemed like something the writers saw on r*ddit and decided to make an episode about it. They mentioned they had people who comb social media for plot ideas. They did not consult actual experts in these subjects, however. The lucid dreaming and "China Bad!" plots are prime examples.
And then it just kind of ends. So I guess none of these stories mattered because Katya moves her kids to Rome, divorces her husband, and continues to have a weird relationship with Michael the priest because Allah forbid we make stories without romance subplots.