'Evil's Final Season Thrives on Longer Episode Count
In an age of 8-episode seasons, 14 episodes feels like a dream.
*Spoiler warning for all four seasons of Evil.
Evil may stream on Paramount+, but as its final season airs, it’s feeling more like it’s back on network television, in the best way. Evil, a horror series about three assessors, David (Mike Colter), Kristen (Katja Herbers), and Ben (Aasif Mandvi), for the Catholic Church that look into suspected demonic (or occasionally angelic) activity, actually started on CBS. This may surprise people who know just how wacky the show is, that something this weird had its shot alongside standard police and legal dramas. Despite the very positive buzz for the show, ahead of its second season, it was quietly shuffled off to streaming, where it’s lived in relative obscurity ever since (funnily enough, the show has gotten new life since recently being added to Netflix). Yet, as I watch its fourth and final season, the show’s expanded episode count has me nostalgic for the heyday of broadcast television.
It’s no secret that seasons have been getting shorter. Gone are the standard 16-20+ episode seasons of broadcast, as streaming–and subsequently cable–have ushered in an age where seasons are ten episodes or less. Actually, ten is considered sizable these days. No one even blinks at a season being a measly six episodes. People might grumble to their friends and family members about the lack of story, but then they shrug their shoulders because they know that’s the way of things now. The shorter runs have the odd effect of making seasons feel simultaneously too short and dragged out.
Call it the Veronica Mars effect. The original run of that show featured 20-22 episode seasons, and always mixed a larger mystery overlaying the series with case of the week episodes. When the series was revived 13 years later on Hulu, the season–a scant 8 episodes featuring only one single mystery–the entire season crawled. Turns out that blend of A-plots and B-plots was essential for making a season fly by.
To be fair, Evil has never abandoned that particular structure, even as it moved to streaming. The shortest season–season 3 at 10 episodes (the previous two had 13 episodes each)–still did its standard case of the week hauntings, including an internet boogeyman, a ghost highway, and a haunted stock option. All this while dealing with the ongoing threat from the show’s villain, Leland Townsend (a deliciously evil Michael Emerson), following David on his adventures for the Entity (a secret Vatican task force), and waiting to see if Kristen’s husband Andy (Patrick Brammall) was going to make it home alive.
Still, when I heard this was going to be the final season, I was worried. The show had left so many demonic threads hanging, I didn’t know how it was going to wrap it all up in time. How were we going to find our way out of Sheryl’s (Christine Lahti) thorny association with Leland? What was going to happen with the antichrist (born of Kristen’s egg, no less)? Would Kristen and David ever give into their feelings for each other? Would Andy survive Leland’s continued control? And what about that map of the different demonic houses? It was a tangled and sticky web, and I feared a streaming-length season would make untangling it feel rushed.
Well, I needn’t have worried. Ahead of the show returning, it was announced that the season would have an additional 4 episodes, for a total of 14. Hell, that’s right up there with network television level lengths! And I can feel the luxury of such a length in the episodes, as I gobble them up each week. (Seriously, if you haven’t started the new season yet, I highly recommend. This season is on its A-game.) As we confront a demon who feeds on words, possessed robo-dogs, and a possible coven of witches, I can see the ongoing storylines gradually circling for a landing. In particular, the situation between Leland and Sheryl is finally coming to a head–a relief, since it always seemed odd to me that Sheryl stood by while Leland messed with her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughters.
The developments made in each storyline feel so deliberate. It’s a show that knows exactly what it’s doing. Evil season 4 knows where it needs to go and how to get there. As a viewer, I get to just sit back and let Robert and Michelle King (Evil’s creators) take me on this journey, and trust that I’m being led to a satisfying conclusion.