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‘Evil’ Review: A Wilder, More Stuffed Season 2 Is Still in Touch with Its Devilish Side
Believing in anything can be messy, so it only makes sense that “Evil” would be, too. The show, which debuts its Season 2 this weekend on Paramount+, fashioned itself as something of a belief kaleidoscope when its initial season aired on CBS proper in late 2019 and early 2020.
The show’s initial hook came from the pervasive-yet-cordial disagreements between Catholic Church assessor David Acosta (Mike Colter) and psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), each tasked with working together to evaluate claims of otherworldly forces in the lives of people in and around New York. Each inexplicable phenomenon that they and universal skeptic Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) encountered over the course of that first season was met with a range of theories stemming from steadfast doctrine adherence (the presence of malignant spirits bent on manipulating humans’ better instincts) to simple scientific explanation (usually an abundance of a household chemical only intended to be used in small amounts).
It would be easy to claim that Season 2 delivers more of the same, but that would undersell the extent to which these new episodes have a far greater dose of “more” than “the same.” After already building to something of a unified theory that tied most of the mysterious Season 1 occurrences together, “Evil” keeps some of that framework and spends the early going of this new season by adding rather than refining. Here be invocations in archaic languages, accidental amputations, and clear-headed confessions of felonies punishable by life in prison.
