The Freaky Feminism of 'Evil,' TV's Weirdest Horror Hit

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Flytrap Fridays will run here on the blog, free for everyone to read, until Election Day. Think of it as a little ~ amuse bouche ~ for the Flytrap-curious. In our first edition, Flytrap co-founder s.e. smith brought us spooky-season goodness with “The Pumpkins of Fir Street.” Then, Tina Vásquez penned a moving reconsideration of “Roseanne,” and Nicole Froio gave us an essay on female villains — real, imagined, and purported. In this special Halloween double feature, Andrea Grimes grapples with the freaky feminism of CBS’ “Evil,” while Chrissy Stroop unpacks why evangelicals love to hate the holiday.

Of the early-aughts era feminist blogosphere’s many messy tropes and tendencies, none once delighted me more than the awful, inevitable question: “Is it feminist?” 

The question’s applications were as varied as its premise was facile. Impossible to answer to any given feminist’s satisfaction, we nevertheless demanded a verdict on everything from Sex and the City to body hair management to voting (or not). Was it “feminist” to watch reality television? Was it “feminist” to count calories, to color our hair, to reclaim “cunt”? I posed the question liberally myself, or otherwise camped out in comments sections, thirsty for the debates — the self-righteousness, the defensiveness, the fucks given and the fucks eschewed.

The usual resolution involved an unsatisfying determination: “It’s problematic.” Might anything be feminist? Of course. But for sure it — whatever “it” was — was “problematic,” which became its own messy, awful, inevitable trope, a means of avoiding more specific, substantive critiques of racism, ableism, cis-normativity, capitalism, and the wider world of systemic manifestations of fuckery. Eventually, I came to understand that “it’s problematic” was an empty answer to a pointless query — one that, as the feminist blogosphere shuffled off into its own kind of afterlife, I thought I’d grown bored with, or maybe grown out of.

Until, that is, the CBS/Paramount+ monster-of-the-week juggernaut Evil became my early-pandemic-era binge of choice. I was hooked from jump, charmed by the lead trio’s dynamic — an atheist, an agnostic, and a believer are tasked by the Catholic Church with assessing the validity of alleged demonic possessions in the Greater New York City area — and fully creeped out by the high production value afforded to the practical and special effects that brought all manner of supernatural beings-and-happenings to life on screen.

But I was not very many episodes in before I found myself unsettled by something other than the show’s skillfully crafted creatures of the night. To borrow another tiresome trope from perhaps the ur-problematic pseudo-feminist icon: I couldn’t help but wonder, “Is Evil feminist?”

In my defense, Evil practically hit viewers over the head with the question. From day one, the assessor-team’s resident agnostic, Dr. Kristen Bouchard, grapples openly with (apparently) ~ having it all ~ in the form of four (!) plucky daughters, an absentee husband living out the dream of her (first) career (professional mountain climber) which she gave up (for motherhood) while building her second career (forensic psychologist), which she only barely manages thanks to child-rearing help from her (demonstrably sexy, sort of boy-crazy) free-spirit-type mom, while Bouchard navigates the tantalizing prospect of an adulterous will-they-won’t-they relationship with her fellow assessor, a (post-Fleabag) hot priest.

That’s a lot of words that you might not expect to follow each other! It’s wild, the necessity of all of those parentheticals alone, just to get one character’s background established. But the show was relentless and ham-fisted with its gender politics: The central narrative across Evil’s four seasons rested squarely on issues of reproductive agency, sexual coercion, and motherhood. I mean, heck — (well, literally, Hell!) — Evil’s ultimate apocalypse plot was orchestrated in a demonic office wherein women employees literally work under a glass ceiling.

That kind of thing, the glass ceiling thing, is precisely what I found maddeningly compelling about the show, and which drove me bonkers about it at the same time. The showrunners — Michelle and Robert King, the married writer duo behind The Good Wife and The Good Fight, both TV shows concerned with how women navigate justice, politics, and morality — couldn’t have signaled more clearly that they were not done with conversations around women’s personal and private roles in modern life. But this time, they added an eschatological twist: What if the fate of humanity was on the line?    

Sadly, Evil was canceled suddenly earlier this year and thus the Kings were forced to wrap up its fourth and final season in a whirlwind of absolute narrative chaos. But the show — even after it moved from being a more-thoughtful-than-usual network vehicle on CBS to a slightly edgier production streaming on Paramount+ — was never particularly deft or nuanced in the way it handled key themes, among them: womanhood, parenthood, organized religion, human fallibility, technophilia and technophobia, and the (Biblically designated) end of the world.

Evil was pure pandemonium from jump, a parade of “Wow, I did not see that coming” memes, whether in tone, in subject matter, or in execution. It was a mess — a hilarious, terrifying, snappily-dialogued mess replete with chewy cameos — that ultimately worked because its core performers were remarkably adept at selling characters whose decisions ranged from believable to batshit not just across seasons, but often within episodes. I could never quite get used to just watching the show even as I disabused myself of the expectation that any given iteration would be internally consistent — anything other than everything, everywhere, all at once: funny, scary, disturbing, serious, preachy, goofy, sexy, sad, troubling, moving, enraging, frustrating, silly.

If ever Evil was anything consistently, it was self-possessed (pun intended). It drew enthusiastically from the great paradigms of horror and science fiction, especially as they pertain to women: pregnancy terror most of all, but also hysterical mothers and grandmothers and daughters, covens and witchery, patriarchal control, and the simultaneously sacrilegious and titillating potential of unburdened female sexuality.

Fans of television genre fiction will quickly pick up what Evil is putting down: If you cared about Dana Scully’s weird motherhood experience(s) in the X-Files, you’ll be fascinated (and confused) by Dr. Bouchard’s ultimately nonplussed relationship to the antichrist in Evil. If you liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s ass-kicking nonchalance even as the titular character fell for the unattainable vampire-bro, you’ll get most of the ~ problematic ~ relationships in Evil. If you love the puzzle stories of Lost or From, you’ll be annoyingly satisfied by the resolution-sans-answers of the last four episodes of Evil. And if you’re just desperate for witty riposte in the manner of Sleepy Hollow or Castle, I assure you that Evil will scratch that itch. It is, genuinely, a great fucking show. 

And I still don’t understand why people — myself included — like it so much.    

Unusually for a genre production on a mainstream network, Evil was universally well received among critics, beloved not despite its tonal discombobulation but because of it: Critics at Variety, the New York Times, Slate, the New Republic, and the New Yorker all celebrated the series and mourned its cancellation. But very few of the show’s high-minded critical appreciators delved into the show’s heavy-handed gender politics, tending instead to focus on its equally laborious treatment of the Catholic Church and general ambivalence around the good and (of course) evil impulses of its characters, whatever their gender.

This blows my mind. Did we watch the same show? Because I watched a show that, in practically every episode, challenged me to evaluate, reevaluate, situate, and resituate the decisions and motivations of a fascinating, weird, brilliant, sometimes inscrutable cast of women and girl characters — among them a nun, a mother, a grandmother, a cult leader, a doctor, a psychologist, a cop, a daughter, a Christian, a time-traveler, a student, a farmer, a kid, an executive, a psychic, a scientist, a Muslim, a Catholic, a slut…. The list could go on, but for those who haven’t seen it, all you need to know is: Evil is concerned deeply with what women and girls do, and why, and under what circumstances. And the show never failed to note that the patriarchy — among other systemic influences — creates the circumstances under which those characters operate. And yet the development of these storylines was woefully uneven; some questions were asked and never answered, while others were answered without ever being asked.

As I said: It’s not like Evil is playing coy. Whether it’s Dr. Bouchard giving church bosses what-for about the fact that most of her team’s cases involve supposedly non-compliant women, demonic women staffers tired of Satan’s hoof on their necks, or a mouthy nun’s rationalization of her role literally cleaning up after the priests in her local diocese even as she saves them from evil forces, Evil absolutely lets its unpredictable, irreligious gender politics rip to the fullest extent that a network-backed show is ever going to let anything even tangentially critical of mainstream, white, cis-hetero-patriarchal Christianity rip.

And yet, it’s mostly been left to the show’s female cast to hype its feminist bona fides: In an interview on The Talk, Christine Lahti (who plays the sexy grandma) called the show “very feminist,” while Katja Herbers, who plays Dr. Bouchard, described her character to San Diego Comic-Con attendees in 2022 as a “feminist hero, in a way.” And like, sure: if Lahti and Herbers feel like they’ve played feminist characters on a feminist show, more power to them. I don’t disagree. But I don’t agree, either.

And I’m not sure if that’s because I’m looking for an easy way to understand a show that, ultimately, delighted in making little to no sense, and was no less entertaining or valuable for it. Evil was clever and silly and challenging in the way that a conversation with a 10th grader fresh from St. Whatsit’s Catholic Academy theology class is clever and silly and challenging. Deceptively simple. Aggressively pedantic. Absolutely maddening. Hilariously unconcerned.

Evil had me driving myself crazy asking simple questions, even as I knew it laughed at my search for serious answers. It was, in many ways, the inverse of my early 2000s feminist blogosphere days, when I and so many others twisted ourselves in knots trying to map feminist politics onto resistant, even hostile, cultural artifacts. Evil was a cultural artifact positively begging to be called feminist, a show which drenched itself in feminist signifiers. And that’s what feels so off about it — this was a show all about the power of questioning the obvious and accepting that we’ll never have all the answers, while the ones we do get might not come easy and might not make any sense.

So: “Is Evil feminist?”

I don’t know. It’s certainly possible.

Which is, I think, exactly what Dr. Bouchard would say.

This piece was edited by Nicole Froio and copy-edited by Aria Velasquez.

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