This Horror Series Can't Be Saved Despite Popularity

Make no mistake about it, with the number of streaming services out there these days, it can be hard to figure out which one viewers should spend their time with. Perhaps that’s why Paramount Pus doesn’t always make the best decisions when it comes to what shows it renews and what shows it cancels. Unfortunately it made a pretty massive mistake when it decided to cancel the horror series Evil. Canceling the show wasn’t only a mistake because it’s quite popular or because it was very, very good. Canceling the show was a mistake because the streamer has a problem when it comes to tentpole original programming.

Those reasons are also why there was some excitement among the fan base that Paramount Plus might rethink its approach. There was also the argument that horror series are getting more popular all the time, and Evil was offering a horror series that was quite a bit different from anything else on any other platform. When the show also started getting streamed on Netflix even more people got to see how good the show was and even more people hoped that perhaps they could find a way to save the show. But as it turns out, there is and was no saving Evil. No matter how many sacrifices people made to their favorite demons.

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By  Andrew McRae

What Is Evil On Paramount Plus About?

Evil set itself apart from other horror shows quickly because it involved a priest, a psychologist, and a technology expert who teamed up to investigate people who came to the church, claiming demons possessed them or the people they love. Along the way the investigators run afoul from an organization that is run by actual demons and the people that serve them. The point of the organization was to bring about the end of the world piece by piece but they saw that the team, David, Kristen and Ben could thwart them.

The show ran for four seasons with the team dealing with a “monster of the week” adventure while also doing battle with the demon organization. Evil started on broadcast television on CBS, but was moved to Paramount Plus as one of its big offerings after the first couple of seasons and for a while it looked like it had found a home as it followed Kristen and her four daughters, as well as her husband Andy, as well as Ben and his rather odd girlfriends and David’s advancement to full-fledged priest while fighting against Leland Townsend and his cohorts, including Kristen’s mother.

Actors Worked To Save The Show

Evil became one of the many shows that Paramount Plus has, unfortunately, pulled the plug on since the streamer launched March 4, 2021 as a rebranded version of CBS All Access. While there were originally conflicting reports as to why the show was canceled, it was indeed announced in February of 2024 that Season 4 would be its last.

Not long after that announcement, the stars of the show that was equal parts funny and spooky started taking to social media trying to get another streaming service to pick the series up. Once the series landed on Netflix and even more people saw just how good it was, there even felt like there might be enough of a push that if Netflix didn’t decided to buy the rights, that some other streaming service might. That hope seemed to fizzle out just this month when series creators Michelle and Robert King spoke about Evil during an interview with Screen Rant at the New York Comic Con. The creators told the site that they felt the show was simply discovered too late.

“Why can't we back up history about a year?” Robert King said. “Because a lot of the fans came are probably a little too late to save the show. Although never say never, who knows?”

Loss Of Evil Makes A Big Hole

If there is a reason that Evil still has a chance to exist, it’s because the show really does stand out in what has become a rather crowded genre. Monsters and slashers and ghouls and ghosts are all over the place these days. Horror shows and horror movies seem like they’re more popular than ever before, especially with all the streaming services offering variations on a theme.

That demons are involved, but almost never in the usual way, the show has some really cool themes. There’s also the added bonus that at times it feels like this is a live action Scooby-Doo where the team is trying to prove that what looks like some sort of demonic interference is really just a trick of technology. The big difference between Scooby-Doo and Evil is that more often than not, especially in the earlier seasons, whether or not the culprit was a real monster or a trick is left up for debate at the end of every episode.