Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Evil’ Season 3 On Paramount+, Where David And Kristen’s Relationship Gets Complicated While They’re Searching For Demons

Michelle and Robert King have found out how freeing it is to have a show on streaming versus on a broadcast network. Though they have proven they can work within the confines of network TV (The Good Wife, season 1 of Evil), you can sense their glee as they are now able to give their characters the ability to lay down f-bombs and have some more explicit sexy times than before. With Evil, that was necessary as the demons in the lives of its characters get more bold and, frankly, sexier. Season 3 picks up right where Season 2 left off.

EVIL SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We pick up right where Season 2 ended, with Kristen (Katja Herbers) giving a confession to newly-minted priest David (Mike Colter), admitting to the killings she’s committed, and the two of them kiss.

The Gist: The two of them are about to have sex, when David stops himself, and Kristen leaves. But then, as he’s contemplating his own sins, she comes back and insists that no one needs to know.

The next morning, Kristen tells her daughters Lexis (Maddy Crocco), Lynn (Brooklyn Shuck), Laura (Dalya Knapp) and Lila (Skylar Gray) that they should tell her immediately if Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson) approaches them, like he approached Lexis at her school. She serves him with a restraining order, right in front of Monsignor Korecki (Boris McGiver).

Kristen, David and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) are assigned to supervise Dr. Beverly Swan (Ruthie Ann Miles) and her experiment to see if the body weighs less right after death. Of course, to David that means there’s a soul that leaves the body, but Ben doesn’t think you can “use science to get to God.” Kristen is somewhere in between. Father Frank Ignatius (Wallace Shawn), near death from a rare cancer, volunteers to be the subject. But something happens; he dies for a minute, but then wakes up, the cancer mostly gone.

Kristen’s husband Andy (Patrick Brammall) comes back home for good, and he immediately tells Kristen’s mother Sheryl (Christine Lahti) to leave; he also finds something under the bed in his bedroom that’s creepy AF. Meanwhile, David keeps having dreams that a demonic version of Kristen keeps making love to him, and he finds out from her that what he thought happened between them after the kiss never actually happened.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’ve always thought that Evil was a spiritual cousin (pun intended) to The X-Files, and that’s even more apparent in its third season.

Our Take: There’s a reason why we liked Evil when it debuted on CBS in 2019; it was the rare network drama that wasn’t stupid, which is saying a lot. It had the same combination of character arcs, cases of the week, and biting humor that Michelle and Robert King brought to their series The Good Wife and The Good Fight. And season 3 continues that style, except with a cast who has two seasons of a show under their belts.

Evil is the kind of show that you can jump into even if you don’t know everything about the character arcs, because their cases of the week are so strong; here, the trio is only asked to supervise, not investigate, but the story is more there as a Wallace Shawn showcase more than anything else. We thought Father Frank’s story, where it seems like he feels able to express himself freely now that he has a second chance — which also means he expressed how he felt about the monsignor — could have been given more time. But it was fun to see Shawn and his pugnaciousness celebrate getting that chance.

There was a lot to pack into the episode, including the Bouchard girls messing with Leland on an online role-paying game. Kristen has raised some pretty smart girls, and we’re pretty sure Sheryl’s fighting spirit has rubbed off on them, too; Lexi seemed to know right away that Leland was trying to get to her via that game, and all the girls joined in to torture him. It was a funny way to see the creepy Leland get a little comeuppance, even if it’s only temporary.

But we also packed in Andy’s return, Sheryl cursing him out to whomever she prays to, Dr. Boggs (Kurt Fuller) getting a lecture on the demons that possess him from Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), Kristen and David sorting out what happened when she confessed, David’s sexy demonic dreams, and we’re sure one or two other things. But all of it was so seamless that we couldn’t get all that upset that we didn’t get enough of Wallace Shawn’s story. We wonder if the idea of souls leaving and/or demons entering a body upon death will be explored more during the season.

Sex and Skin: We see lots of David and Kristen (mostly the demon version of her) in their undies. But one thing we now know: Herbers is pretty good at talking dirty on camera.

Parting Shot: During another sexual dream with the demon version of Kristen, David sees the nun who was the second person who submitted to the experiment. When she died, she ended up weighing more; he speculated to Kristen and Ben that a demon left Father Ignatius and entered the nun.

Sleeper Star: One of the things that the Kings are adept at is employing excellent character actors in quirky regular roles, which is what we see with Kurt Fuller as Dr. Boggs and Andrea Martin as Sister Andrea. Even if they get one scene in every episode, they each make the most of their time.

Most Pilot-y Line: As the Bouchard girls keep peppering Leland with questions on the RPG, he throws down his phone, says “Fuckin’ kids!” and smashes it with his foot. Dude, you can just uninstall the app.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Evil continues its smart combination of weekly cases with strong character arcs, all with the Kings’ dry sense of humor intact throughout the first episode of Season 3.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.