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.