The defiantly SEO-proof CBS-to-Paramount+ show Evil, created by The Good Wife’s Michelle and Robert King, has got to be the best slept-on series out there. (And in this late era of prestige TV, there are many contenders.) Evil—the show, not, alas, the metaphysical concept—ends on Thursday after getting canceled earlier this year. A few months after its cancellation, its first two seasons came out and did gangbusters numbers on Netflix. The unfairness, to many fans, feels cosmic.
At the beginning of Season 1, the show’s central trio—Katja Herbers’ Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist, former semi-professional mountain climber, and mother of four girls; Mike Colter’s David Acosta, a preposterously handsome priest; and Aasif Mandvi’s Ben Shakir, a skeptical tech expert—are commissioned by the Catholic Church to act as “assessors.” As their friendship deepens, the assessors investigate possibly supernatural happenings, attend many exorcisms, and uncover a conspiracy to bring “the ultimate evil” to New York City, spearheaded by the corrupt freak-o Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson, who got his doctorate in playing ingratiating creeps from Lost University).
I will deeply miss Evil—the snap of the Kings’ dialogue, the hilariously disgusting creature design of the demon characters, the astute critique of life online, the constant overlapping teenage chatter of Kristen’s four daughters (watch those scenes with subtitles!). On the occasion of its final episode (for now?), Robert and Michelle King agreed to debrief. We talked about the plot holes they closed up, and those they left open; the many similarities between The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick and Evil’s Kristen Bouchard; and that one bathtub scene that Evil fans will never forget. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: You had to wind this show up quickly, in four episodes, from what I’ve read. And in the interim, the first two seasons have found a new viewership on Netflix, and fans have been lobbying hard for Evil to find a new home. Having watched all of Season 4 now, I see a lot of ways the show could start again, if given the chance: Timothy, Kristen’s baby, may or may not be the Antichrist; Kristen’s poor, beleaguered ex-husband Andy is out there somewhere, never having really realized what happened to him while he was kidnapped by Leland; there’s an all-new, interesting Italian setting. How did you choose which parts of the plot to tie up, and which parts to leave a little undone, just in case some angel comes down and says, “You have more money! Time to make more!”?
Michelle King: Well, we started with the truth that evil continues to exist, regardless of the wishes of Paramount+. So by definition, if evil continues to exist, the story continues to exist. We wanted to reflect that, but it was important to us to give some resolution to these characters because we wanted to know how their story, if it didn’t end, at least paused.
Robert King: You’re trying to honor the truth, as Michelle said. You’re also trying not to answer every question, because that just seems like bad writing to say, “Oh, this is solved; this is solved,” and you’re just going down the list and going check, check, check.
In theory, if Timothy is indeed the Antichrist, and Kristen covers for him, it works for a lot of what has happened in the series. Kristen has four daughters, and now a son. If Kristen’s mothering instincts are going to continue, and she hides things from David because of that, it also answers a lot of questions about Kristen’s daughter Lexis—all those things kind of fall in line. You don’t have to believe [the visitor in Episode 11 who claims to know what will happen to the Bouchard family] was from the future to go, OK, some of this stuff probably makes sense in the mythology of the show.
Totally. It also works given Leland’s pitch to his demon overlord about how Kristen should be the one who raises the Antichrist.
Robert King: Yeah, in Episode 9, Leland argues that the magic water [the church] baptized Timothy with can’t win against a mother who’s evil. The idea that Kristen is evil goes against what you feel when you watch the show, because you embrace Kristen. You love Kristen! Just like in The Good Wife, in many ways you loved Alicia Florrick. And then there was an episode where Alan Cumming’s character Eli Gold comes over to her house, when she’s thinking of running for something, and lays out all the ways she has not been loved, why she is corrupt. I think the same thing was true with Leland’s speech about Kristen: Wait a minute, she did kill somebody. She did cheat on her husband. So there are all these ways that, because you’re living the show through Kristen’s eyes, you accept and kind of forgive—but are these things forgivable? In the long run of things, this is a good question.
Interesting that you bring up our love for Kristen, because another question I have is about everything that happens to her in the last little stretch of the show, the second half of this season. She loses her job, she loses her husband, she has a number of stressful situations that occur with her daughters. She loses her mom, which is huge! And it made me cry in a way that I didn’t sort of expect. She’s got a real Job-from-the-Bible situation going on at the end here. But yet she still has a sort of indomitability about her. What made you decide to pile so much on her at the end here?
Michelle King: Part of it is the fun of seeing Kristen’s resilience. I mean, as you say, she’s lost her job, she’s lost her marriage. She’s suddenly got a new baby to raise, and yet she’s going to make her way to Rome in fabulous sunglasses and a great dress. So that’s your optimism.
Robert King: We’re nothing if not superficial, where we feel a great wardrobe solves everything. Because as unfortunate as all these events are, Kristen still has [costume designer] Dan Lawson dressing her, and those sunglasses are cool.
I think the other part is the show wanted to address the whole idea of disintegration of our system. Obviously, it was written when we thought the presidential election was heading in a different direction, so there might’ve been some of that in it, but we really did feel like it serviced the show if you have four episodes left to address the fact the show was ending, itself. So as the assessors are talking about the Catholic Church ending their program, even though it’s quite successful, you could easily put in “CBS,” for us, or whatever. It felt like that was fitting to the closing down of the show.
Almost all of the people that we have close to our hearts after watching the show end it facing a trial, or more than one trial. Even Ben gets this very high-paying job, but then when he gets to the workplace, it’s sterile and awful—and he opens up his desk drawer and somebody has scratched “RUN” into it. Which is a little detail that I absolutely loved. That also seemed like that was sort of leaving an interesting storyline for Ben, if we do get more Evil.
By the end of the show, you’re winding up not one, but two great workplace storylines with their own fun dynamics. Obviously, any time the assessors are all on screen, it’s delightful. But the trio of Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), Father Ignatius (Wallace Shawn), and David, who live together at the church, has also developed a parallel dynamic. How do you approach trying to give people who are feeling lots of big feelings about the end of a show that they love some kind of catharsis around the end of these relationships, without being too sweet or too obvious about it?
Michelle King: Well, we tried to keep one leg in reality in that yes, these characters like each other a whole bunch, but Ben is not going to run off with them to Rome and leave an amazing paycheck behind. That is not really the way the world works.
Robert King: And yet one thing we found with finales is the audience really does want some gift, and I think the gift here is for the Bouchard women and David to go off to Rome. The kids are eating gelato and they’re in those great—again, superficial!—outfits, and Katja looks like a dream. Mike looks great, whatever he wears, but to be in that outfit and put on great sunglasses too … I think there was a sense that the ending is Pollyanna-ish. That’s also a setup for the punchline, which is what happens with the baby, Timothy [whose eyes turn demonic for a second]. But the audience can overlook that and go, Yeah, I’m glad she’s there. I’m glad they’re both there and I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Speaking of things that probably shouldn’t happen, but people really maybe want to have happen—let’s talk about Kristen and David. Episode 11, where the woman who claims to be a time traveler predicts that David will leave the priesthood and marry Kristen, then we find out that she’s just disturbed, is like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick to the people who wanted them to get together. But now that I hear you talking about the need to balance realism and a gift to the audience, I’m like: I was an idiot. How could I have ever thought they would do that? There’s no way.
Robert King: Especially because Mike Colter does such a good job with that speech about how David can’t break off a commitment that he made, in this instance to the church—that this would change who he is.
Was there ever any thought, Yes, we’ll get them together?
Michelle King: Not a realistic one. I mean, if you’ve got characters that are attracted to one another, that’s always an option on the table. But we never took seriously the exploration of that.
Robert King: At the end of the second season, we painted ourselves in a corner by having them kiss after she confesses, and I think it even goes as far as they start moving towards the bed. But we knew when we came back the next season, we’d have to find a creative way out of that dilemma that gave the audience what they wanted, but also said no to that too. And that was through Demon Kristen [who appears to David]. So that was a creation of the next season, but I think when we ended the second season, we knew we’d painted ourselves in a corner.
Part of this is the problems we’ve had on The Good Wife with this are they, aren’t they relationship between the characters played by Josh Charles and Julianna Margulies. We always found with that it became kind of a schmuck’s game … Are they going to be together, are they not?
Michelle King: You don’t want to be in the land of binary choices.
I’m a person who loves to ship. I like to watch something and want people to get together, but I imagine as a writer of this kind of TV show, you’re like, this is a nuclear option for compelling some people to be interested in this show, to inject a will they, won’t they. But once you do it, it’s so hard to get out of.
But with all this, those lines between David and Kristen in the bathtub after they’ve sheltered there during a hurricane, in Episode 10—David says to Kristen, “I wish I had two lives. One for God. And one for you,” and Kristen says to David, “I wish I had two lives … both of them for you”—those, I think, are going to be instantly iconic. Who was responsible for those?
Robert King: The strike happened in between the original shooting of that episode, and we still had six days to shoot at the end of the strike. And when we went back to it, Michelle and I realized we didn’t think it had gone deep enough with the emotion of these two. It all seemed to be about the girls and Sister Andrea praying, and not about how silent that room would be, in the aftermath of a hurricane, and the way true disasters bring out the deepest in people. So I do think, Michelle, it was you and I talking that we need something more there.
In terms of other major questions that get readdressed in these final episodes, both Father Ignatius and David have major crises about still being involved with the Catholic Church. Wallace Shawn’s delivery, in Episode 13, of the line “I’m reaching the end of my life feeling like a fool” really had me. I have to say, as I’m not a person of faith, I was surprised to find myself really compelled and interested in Father Ignatius’ story. The church in the parish that they served gets sold to the show’s Amazon analog, CongoRun, and it’s not just their workplace, it’s their home. It’s their center. I found that very moving. How did you think about representing this crisis of faith for an audience that may or may not care?
Michelle King: I think we wanted to be, with all of the characters, realistic, as opposed to painting them as ideals. So in terms of people of faith, yes, some of them might have doubts, just like parents might be truly loving and yet have moments of frustration—no one is perfect in any job.
Robert King: And I would say in The Good Wife and The Good Fight, we were writing through the position of a Chicago liberal—no matter what was going to come out of their mouth, it was going to be liberal sentiments. But you would still find liberal racism. You’d find liberal misogyny. The same thing was true with Evil. You wrote from the position of someone who had been in the church for a while, and they would talk cynically about the scandals. Sister Andrea at one point tells Father Ignatius, “Hey, I wasn’t the one molesting altar boys.” Not meaning that he did, but the priests did. You wanted the dialogue that would be true to people in that universe.
And from the outside, you always kind of have a clichéd idea of someone; you think, All right, well, most Fathers in the church were molesting boys, or whatever. But in fact, there are true believers who are struggling within a bureaucracy that they often disbelieve in, even though they believe in the faith of Jesus and God and everything that it’s supposed to be about. That seemed interesting to us.
And the other thing for Michelle and myself is to try to break the cliché. When a priest is introduced in the first act, you know they’re going to end up molesting a boy, in any procedural. A lot of it was just trying to show people who were not that, but had their own problems.
Michelle King: They should be actual clergy folks, not network clergy folks.
Well, it also helps to have Wallace Shawn for the part.
Robert King: Oh yes. And always the thing that helps is comedy. Wallace Shawn and Andrea Martin are two great comic actors, but to see Wallace Shawn, like he is in Episode 13, sitting with a little bowl of marshmallows in front of a hole in a wall, tempting a demon to come out—it’s kind of like what Quentin Tarantino said: You can have any conversation you want, as long as you think someone’s going to run through the door with a gun and kill everyone. Same thing with comedy. They can talk about serious things, but if they’re funny and they’re in this ridiculous situation, you’re probably going to watch it and your judgment goes down a little bit more.
You guys are always writing in relationship to the political situation in the actual world. As an editor and writer of content that responds quite quickly to that same world, I know it can be hard to operate on the right time scale. I’m always curious about how people running TV shows handle that. There are some other TV shows that I won’t name that sort of have trouble with that, aligning themselves with the way that the vibes are shifting. In some ways, this show coming to an end when it’s ending is kind of perfect, since the zeitgeist is moving around in unpredictable ways.
Michelle King: I’m going to answer for all of our shows, not just Evil. And yes, we are absolutely aware of that. We’re aware of subjects burning so bright that they’re going to seem dated in three months, and yet there are certain issues that are evergreens—whether you’re talking about racism or problems in the Middle East or environmental crises—today, six months from now.
Robert King: One example from Evil is before the strike, so I think it was March of last year, we had read an article—I think it was in the New York Times—about generative A.I., and went, Oh my God, there’s something there. But our worry was that, obviously, it was just blowing up, and every show would write about it, and every show would write some version of the same thing. So it was only when we did further research about these chatbots that would—almost in a reverse of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—be sold to people wanting to remember someone they broke up with, a lover, someone they would lose through death. And that was the way to make it particular to the show, where, even if everybody started writing about A.I.—which of course they did—we thought by that summer we would still have a live show. Then the strike happened, and we were delayed a year. But I think we were all right because of the very particular way we hit the subject.
Well, the good thing about the subject of Evil: The idea that people are getting meaner or that people are getting worse is so subjective. We all see it in certain ways. So then you can kind of create a parallel world in the show from that feeling. It’s a non-falsifiable hypothesis, that people are getting meaner.
Robert King: One of my favorite scenes is that we had a woman in an episode that was about the assessors investigating a possible angel saving people from a collapsed building. And she comes in and says to the assessors something like, “Have you noticed people are getting meaner? They’re hitting each other on airplanes and everybody’s writing about it. You know what that means? It means your side is losing.” And it was so well performed. But that, I think, tells us a lot about what the show was about or trying to be about.
Look, we’ve always benefited from our shows being on the air within four or five months of writing. The Good Fight and Good Wife were very much that way. All we could say is we’ve been lucky, and I’m sure that luck will run out very soon.