Evil

Evil is a CBS TV series consisting of ten episodes aired between September and December in 2019.  The show is currently available streaming "On Demand."  On the evidence of five episodes that I have watched, the program is consistently entertaining with appealing characters and highly intelligent writing -- indeed, the quality of the dialogue and plotting is as good as anything that I have seen recently on network TV.

The show's premise is that the Catholic church investigates miracles and other paranormal phenomenon including varieties of demonic possession.  The purpose for this investigation is to determine whether the paranormal incident has theological dimensions or a natural cause.  For instance, Church authorities are not willing to commit to exorcisms unless they have evidence that the person suffering the affliction is "possessed" as opposed to merely mentally ill.  In order to accomplish these objectives, the Church has designated a team consisting of a young man training for the priesthood, a forensic psychologist and a technology expert whose role is unmask shams and hoaxes that use high-tech means to perpetrate their frauds.  Of course, the investigative team is devised along the lines of the X-Files, one of TV's greatest shows, and a worthy predecessor to Evil  The forensic psychologist is an attractive young woman, Dr. Kristin Bouchard, seasoned in the court-room where she has performed, not too honestly, 34 competency evaluations -- working for the State's attorney, she admits on cross-examination that she has found all 34 defendants competent to stand trial.  After she deviates from this predictable course, considering the possibility that a mass murderer may be demonically possessed, the DA fires her.  But the Priest-in-training, David Acosta, a spectacularly handsome and charismatic African-American man, senses that she is highly intelligent and sufficiently scientific to have an open-mind about the paranormal -- and, so, he recruits her as the "skeptic" (the so-called "Devil's Advocate") on his team. The third member of the group is a Muslim man, Ben Shakir, who specializes in computers and technology -- he is also skeptical by inclination.  Series TV requires that each of these characters have compelling back stories.  For instance, Dr. Bouchard has four daughters, and lives in a funky house under a huge bridge -- it's apparently in Queens.  She was a famous mountaineer before giving up climbilng to raise her family.  Dr. Bouchard's husband, who is unseen in the show, is still a mountain-climber and said to be guiding tourists up Mount Everest while the action of the show unfolds.  Dr. Bouchard's mother, played by Christine Lahti, is an attractive, high-spirited woman in her sixties who hangs around bars prospecting for sexual encounters with men.  David Acosta takes hallucinogens to experience visions of God -- he was a journalist in the Middle East before seeking to become a priest.  Shakir's part is under-written, at least, in the first episodes -- we see him at home with his sister, also a tech expert, who wears a head-scarf.  Clearly, the formula here is directly derived from the X-Files  -- the attractive and spunky rationalist, Dr. Bouchard, plays against the ecstatic seeker, David Acosta just as Gillian Anderson's Dana Scully served as the skeptical counterpart to the mystically inclined Fox Mulder ("I want to Believe") as played by David  Duchovny.  Both Tv shows traffic in unresolved sexual tension between the two principals -- this venerable plot device was the engine for Moonlighting (Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis), worked well in the X-Files and seems no less effective in Evil -- in the 2019 CBS series, Dr. Bouchard is tempted to cheat on her husband, who has deserted her to climb mountains, with the hunky David Acosta.  Acosta is prettier than Bouchard -- he's solidly built with a noble bald ebony head and vast melting eyes and he's pious: we see him praying on his knees.  At the end of the fifth episode, Acosta suggests to Dr. Bouchard that they "maybe get a drink together" -- this seems to me to be a fateful invitation. 

A strong series TV show is often dependent on supporting characters.  Here Christine Lahti as Dr. Bouchard's free-spirited and promiscuous mother does an excellent job with a character who, we think is really only on-board as a babysitter so that her daughter can spend her nights exploring spooky crimes and miracles -- this seems a waste until the fifth episode when there is a truly shocking turn of events involving the heroine's mother that seems to bode ill for Dr. Bouchard (and well for the audience watching the show.)  Also very good is Michael Emerson as the utterly monstrous Dr. Leland Townsend, a nihilistic forensic psychologist, who replaces Dr. Bouchard as a "mouthpiece" for the cynical DA and who may well be some kind of demonic entity himself.  (Emerson is the whitest of all white men, so pale that he is almost translucent, and his WASP line-readings are intended to counterpoint David Acosta's African-American presence as hero and love-interest in the show.)  Four little girls who play Dr. Bouchard's daughters are all very good -- this is one of the few shows that includes a realistic depiction of children -- and there's a handsome, if cadaverous incubus, named George who also gets to creep into the heroine's bed from time to time.  As with the X-Files, some of the episodes are clearly intended to "stand alone" -- that is, to be segments detached from the overall narrative arc involving the continuing characters in the show.  In the X-Files, the stand-alone episodes were often very funny and far and away better than the rather morose, lugubrious narrative arc -- a story involving a shadowy government conspiracy, all sorts of fatal diseases, and, as the show progressed, reproductive problems for the leading lady.  These aspects of the story, involving much portentous and whispered dialogue, were always much less interesting than the witty and, often, quite frightening "creature feature" elements of the show.  Based on the first five episodes of Evil, and by contrast with the X-Files, the plot that binds together the various investigations is actually very good, not slow-moving or pointlessly ominous, and it seems to me, successful as an entertainment.  The individual investigations are well-conceived and, sometimes, exceeedingly frightening -- the material is also quite grim, involving suicides and unsettling murders:  in some ways, the show is more uncompromising than the X-Files.  The first episode involving a mass murderer seems to involve the supernatural, but is resolved on the basis of a natural explanation.  In general, the show defaults to natural explanations for mysterious events although there is an admixture of the occult in the series.  This is evident in the second episode that involves a girl thought to be dead who revives after being without heart beat or respiration for 177 minutes -- this program, which makes a powerful if annoyingly tendentious civil rights argument, was the weakest of the five that I have seen:  but it also involves the unsettling appearance of something that looks like an angel on a hospital surveillance monitor, a motif that is mentioned from time to time as the show progresses.  The third episode involving a cantankerous and abusive Broadway producer who may be possessed by a devil is funny with sinister overtones and a suicide scene that is more effective because it is very underplayed.  The fourth episode involving a little boy who tries to kill his baby sister is extremely disturbing.  The fifth show was created for Halloween and it involves a gruesome exorcism, an assault on Dr. Bouchard's children that is very creepy, and a tour of a "haunted strip club" by paranormal investigators clearly mimicking the foul-mouthed heros of the show Ghost Adventures -- this episode finds the exact right mixture of the uncanny, the horrible, the parodic (there is a witty reprise of the arrival of Max von Sydow in The Exorcist) and the humorous and represents a classic of the genre.  Unless things fall to pieces in the next episodes, Evil represents a considerable achievement and is well worth streaming.