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Imagine The X-Files with religious trauma and you’ve got Evil, the best show you’re not watching. It was on CBS and then bounced to Paramount+ in a time when the streaming platform felt too baby to bother with. Now, Evil is reaching its long, dark claws into Season 4 (dropping May 23), and it’s time you caught up.
Evil is like The X-Files but with demons
Instead of UFO–obsessed Agent Mulder trying to convince skeptical Agent Scully, Evil offers vision-having priest-in-training David Acosta (Mike Colter) trying to convince lapsed Catholic and fiercely rational therapist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) that the devil is in the details.
Everyone on Evil is hot as hell
Colter is a broad-shouldered hunk. Herbers is a no-nonsense knockout. Rounding out their Scooby Gang is Aasif Mandvi as tech expert Ben Shakir, who brings smirking swagger to the New York City-set series.
Evil’s monsters of the week are reliably spine-tingling
Over the course of Season 1-3, Evil introduces a batch of recurring demons, all brought to vivid life with incredible practical effects make-up. Joining in on the fun are kid-taunting ghosts, marauding figures of local legend, internet bogeymen, and Michael Emerson as the series’ ghoulishly amusing antagonist, Leland Townsend.
7. Evil wields a wicked sense of humor.
As the skeptical tech expert, Aasif Mandvi brings a sharp-tongued sarcasm that makes for reliably funny one-liners. But he’s not the show’s sole source of humor.
Creators Michelle King and Robert King have infused irreverent humor into the series, through snide remarks and audacious visuals — including the reveal of Leland’s version of a therapist, who is a full-on goat-headed demon.
8. Evil’s long arc is impossible to predict.
Sure, sure, in the battle of good and evil, the mention of prophesied apocalypse is an inevitability. But amid the monsters and issues tackled week after week, Evil is building an overarching plotline that plays like a mafia drama about demons plotting to spawn the Antichrist.
There are families of demons at war with the Catholic Church, and they’ve got their clawed fingers in all sorts of bloody pies. But as new characters and strange twists turn this God squad’s world upside down, it’s impossible to know what will come next. And that, my fiendish friends, is all part of the fun.
