Michelle and Robert King’s macabre comedy about the possibility of demonic possession and the certainty of evil begins its final season.
Season 3 of “Evil” ended on a typically funny but creepy, outlandish yet somehow understated note. With moments to go in the final episode, Kristen Bouchard, the show’s demon-investigating psychologist, found out that one of her eggs had been fertilized by the sperm of a possible demon. The last thing we saw was her dumbfounded face.
Coming into Thursday’s premiere of the show’s fourth and final season on Paramount+, she and we have had nearly two years to think about how to respond. Kristen’s choice? To laugh, like an only slightly crazy person. “I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3 a.m.,” she tells her nemesis and baby daddy, Leland Townsend, “because the Antichrist needs changing.”
Like just about everything in “Evil,” her riposte works on both the human and the supernatural planes. (All babies can seem like the Antichrist, after all.) This is appropriate given that, with 14 episodes to go, the show’s central characters remain conflicted about whether the weird stuff they experience is a product of the devil or of human malevolence amplified by their own overactive imaginations.
Their indecisiveness goes to the heart of the show, whose fundamental message is that supernatural evil abets, hides behind and jealously competes with everyday human evil. It’s a continuum. You can’t have one without the other.
On the basis of the season’s first four episodes, “Evil” remains one of the smarter, more entertaining and more stylishly produced shows out there, and it continues to carry the hallmarks of its creators and showrunners, Michelle and Robert King.
The music cues are refreshingly offbeat; a character whispers the “Green Acres” theme during a nighttime stakeout in a corn field, and the show reprises its fondness for the novelty songs of Roger Miller. There is the somewhat self-conscious engagement with and critique of digital technology, as characters try to blame social media or rogue hackers for what look like demonic possessions.
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Source: Television - nytimes.com
