Creators Robert and Michelle King on the Ending – MASHAHER

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “Fear of the End,” the series finale of “Evil,” now streaming on Paramount+.

Robert and Michelle King — a.k.a. “the Kings,” the creators of “Evil,” and before that, “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” — want “Evil” fans to know how much they appreciate them. They’ve seen the show’s faithful, fervent audience cut together clip reels of “Evil’s” greatest hits, all designed to convince another streamer to keep the horror series going after its cancellation, which was announced earlier this year. (They’re perhaps aimed especially at Netflix, where “Evil” has done well.)

“It seemed to connect with people in a really strong way,” Robert King said of “Evil” during a recent interview with both showrunners. In this current moment — when the Peak TV bubble has burst, but there’s still way too much television — he said, “you’re doing things in a void,” so when there’s tangible proof that a series has had a real impact, “it’s kind of magic in a way, when people respond.”

Simultaneous with the February announcement that Paramount+ was canceling “Evil” was the news that the Kings were getting four extra episodes attached to Season 4 with which to wrap up the show.

Though no savior for “Evil” has emerged, given the opportunity to script an actual conclusion for it, the Kings have ensured that the show will have an afterlife. Over its four seasons — the first of which premiered on CBS in September 2019, followed by a move to Paramount+ that was announced in May 2021 — the story of “Evil” expanded well beyond its case-of-the-week beginnings to outline a global conspiracy of demonic consortia known as the 60.

As assessors hired by the Catholic Church to investigate possible supernatural events, forensic psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), Father David Acosta (Mike Colter) and scientist Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) clashed with the wealthy Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson), a self-appointed emissary of the 60, a coalition determined to spread calamitous pain and suffering throughout mankind. You know the ones!

In the series finale, promises of Black Mass ceremonies and Kristen’s baby Timothy being the Antichrist — Leland had stolen one of Kristen’s eggs, and with his sperm created an evil baby — proved to be smokescreens for the 60’s even more insidious agenda. (Casually conceiving the Antichrist via IVF is, by Season 4, typical “Evil” stuff.) As Ben says 2/3s of the way through the episode, “What’s the use of all these Satan worshipers running around if you can just meet online?”

Meet online they did. After tricking the Entity, a secret organization within the Vatican designed to police devil-y activities, the 60 simply gather over Zoom. During the meeting, Leland proudly declares victory, crowing, “We’re using technology to plant evil and despair right in the human brain!” Technology, in the end, is the ultimate evil of “Evil,” as the Kings expand on below.

But having been promised bloodshed, the spectral figure of Gray Man — who had appeared outside Kristen’s house in Episode 10, which would have been the Season 4 finale had the extra episodes not been added — wanted more than Leland’s Zoom proclamations about future wins. “What happened to killing the false Antichrist? The baptized one?” Gray asks. “We were promised a Black Mass, a sacrifice of the baby and the mother.” Some backstory: Timothy’s intended mission on Earth had been thwarted when Kristen’s estranged mother Sheryl (Christine Lahti) snuck him away to get baptized by Father Ignatius (Wallace Shawn) and Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), but that’s all the more reason to kill him, one imagines Gray thinks.

So Leland is tasked one last time with sneaking into the Bouchard house to try to kill Kristen and Timothy, and whoever else gets in his way (she does have four daughters, several of whom he’s threatened over the years). But Kristen gets the better of him, once again, and, as much as she wants to kill him in order to be rid of him forever, David and Ben convince her not to.

In a callback to the Season 2 episode “S Is for Silence,” Leland is shoved into a small, diabolically supernatural cabinet in a monastery in upstate New York, where presumably he will suffer for the rest of his life. Unless, as the Kings point out in the interview below, some streamer wants to pick up more “Evil” — at which point Leland could easily just be let out of the cabinet.

As for the conclusion of the main story, David has used his leverage with the Church to reestablish the Assessor program, this time in Rome — and Kristen has brought her whole family there, after initially being skeptical about a move.

In the end, David didn’t leave the priesthood for Kristen, and it’s possible that Timothy isn’t as much of the false Antichrist as one would hope. In one of the show’s final moments, he hisses at Kristen and bares his teeth at her, but stops when she shoves a pacifier in his cute little mouth. When David asks her whether something is wrong, Kristen says “No, nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all,” as the two of them set off for a walk through Vatican City.

Here, the Kings delve into how the series finale of “Evil” came together.

I just wanted to start with the very end. When did you come up with that final scene of Kristen and David working together as assessors in Rome? Was that always going to be the way the show ended, or was it a necessity dictated by the abbreviated final four?

Michelle King: Almost neither of those two. It wasn’t something we’d been thinking about from the beginning, but it wasn’t dictated by there being four episodes. If there had been 10, chances are we would’ve landed in the same place. It just might’ve been a more meandering path.

Robert King: Yeah, I think what we were trying to do was get to a place where there was a move up the hierarchy. If Timothy, the baby, was the Antichrist, how would it move up and corrupt institutions? With “The Omen,” it was that he was adopted by the President of the United States or something, and here it seemed like a more interesting way to go that the corruption that possibly threatens the Catholic Church is the way the Antichrist might enter the world.

And also, you have to heighten an ending a little bit. For people not to be disappointed, it has to kind of go to a new place.

Speaking of Timothy, Kristen sees that snarly little Antichrist face on him — and then shoves a pacifier in his mouth, and just shrugs. On a scale from one to Damien, how concerned should we be about Timothy and the danger he poses going forward?

Robert: Michelle?!

Michelle: Well, it depends whether you subscribe to the supernatural. I mean, if you think there is a supernatural, and that Kristen wasn’t just seeing something — but in fact saw a flash of the Antichrist — yeah, you’d be concerned! But also, the Antichrist is not something that’s showing all the time. So if you’re believing that, then you have to believe that the baptism was at least somewhat successful.

He’s also the cutest baby.

Robert: Oh, my God! He’s so adorable. And you know what? The visual effects had to use the cutest smile to put in the villainy. Like, the cheeks have to kind of come up in that dimply smile for us to be able to make it evil. A bland baby that would not smile, we wouldn’t be able to manipulate that way. There’s some metaphor there for life.

With Kristen and David, she’s now moved her whole family to be with him in another country. Was there ever a scenario in which David might have left the priesthood for her?

Michelle: No one thought about that seriously. I am sure it came up, because why wouldn’t it? But it was never a serious path.

Robert: It felt so much like where “Fleabag” went; it’s where, I think, “Thornbirds” went. I think our interest was always in how can you honor this commitment he’s made, and still make it both romantic — and sort of tragic romantically?

They’re in love with each other. They’re a family. Kristen is looking chic as hell. What do you see when you think about their future in Rome?

Michelle: I’ll speak for myself, then Robert, I’d be curious to know what you think. I think David honors his vows. I think it continues as it’s set up, in that they have a closeness that will not be torn apart, but it’s not that it becomes physical between them.

Robert: Yeah, I think she’s a sexual being. She will have great affairs with a lot of handsome Italian men, but her love is for David.

Leland has been shoved into the cabinet from the monastery in “S Is for Silence” in Season 2. How did you decide that that was going to be his fate?

Robert: The room came up with it, the writers’ room. People were worried about going back to the well where Kristen kills him, because she already killed the serial killer in the first season. There needed to be an answer that seemed to be above the prosaic of murder. And yet you still, in our minds, got the pleasure — if you want to call it that — of her strangling him, up to the point where her friends are worried about her damning her soul with that.

Yet it’s not closed. You can open it again — Pandora’s Box is meant to be opened, so if someone like Amazon Prime, or Netflix, or a rejuvenated Paramount+ wants to open this show again, there are ways to get him out of that box.

Michelle: It also felt more true, if you’re talking thematically. If Leland is evil, evil doesn’t get vanquished so easily. You might stick him in a cupboard, but that’s about as good as you can hope.

Were you concerned at all that a cabinet from a monastery from an episode from Season 2 was too deep of a cut in terms of symbolizing Leland’s final punishment?

Robert: I don’t know. Look, if we were hoping for a sixth season, maybe? But we’re ending the show for ourselves and the actors, and for the crew.

It felt, by the way, in the last five to six minutes, it had to edge towards poetry, not prose — although that’s a very pretentious way to talk about it — something that was a little more metaphoric? Michelle, help me out here. That sounds stupid.

Michelle: Yes, it’s a deep cut, but it’s also the kind of deep cut you don’t really need to know in order to understand what’s going on. I mean, even if you’ve never heard of “S Is for Silence,” they’re shoving him in a closet. You don’t need to know more than that.

And that’s the same actor who played Fenna, the nun, in the episode, right? Alexandra Socha?

Robert: Oh, my God, she’s so good. Yes, it was great to see her again.

What do you think is happening to Leland in that cabinet?

Robert: If we’re talking about reality, Leland’s going to die pretty fast, because he’s going to die of starvation. If it’s metaphor, if it’s about withstanding evil, I think evil does have a tendency to live beyond human understanding. So I think evil just kind of grits its teeth, and waits, and writes out lists of who it’s going to eventually kill. If Roger Stone were put in that cabinet, he’d be making lists in his mind about who he was going to get back at, you know?

Roger Stone! During the Zoom meeting of the 60, Leland says, “We’re using technology to plant evil and despair right in the human brain” — which he’s so excited about. How much of the show’s mythology were red herrings in terms of the evil coming to New York and the “false Antichrist,” as they call Timothy during the Zoom?

Robert: I think it all came down to the 60 finding a way to perpetuate itself that wasn’t based upon legends from the 16th century. What is the modern way? The show always comes down to that line in the very first episode, “Evil is growing because it’s in communication with itself.” One of the ways that social media is basically perpetuating evil, is it allows villains from all corners of the Earth to talk to each other.

So we were always going to head here, where the problem was social media and technology. It all came down to Neuralink technology, where people are both human and technological. If you were to guess where the show would go from the very first season, you’d probably think about Neuralinks, and how they do it — because that is what the show considers the true evil. People not being 100% human; people being part human and part technology, which allows people to manipulate you and control you.

When we finally see the 60 on the Zoom, it’s mostly Bill Ackman-ish, corporate white men with names like Dave and Harry, along with some hoofed creatures sprinkled throughout. How did you want to present the 60 visually?

Michelle: Exactly as you describe it — the most banal corporate Zoom.

Robert: The original idea in the room was that they were all going to meet at one of those hotels near the airport, and they were all kind of dreading it, because they’re salesmen going from place to place to meet.

We’ve all been on those hellish Zooms — Zooms where there’s 60 faces, and they all have to be told to unmute and so on. So we just thought the funniest way to talk about the banality of evil is that it’s a drudgery. It’s a drudgery of meeting after meeting after meeting, and that seems to be the best representation of evil in our present day is a version of modern day capitalism.

Without Leland, what’s going to happen with the 60, do you think?

Robert: I think Leland has always been a striver and climber within the hierarchy of evil. To us, evil is always this thing, you think you’re at the top, but no, there’s one above, there’s one above, there’s one above. And I think Leland was always aiming for the top, and was always going to fall short. He was about pursuing who he thought was the Antichrist. And the irony is he’s right in the end.

I was interested in the idea that Leland has been protecting Kristen all these years, or at least that’s the perception. Can you talk about that a bit?

Michelle: Well, I think there’s an ambivalence there. He does love her, as much as he is capable of love. Or at least he’s hot for her, so he’s not been able to entirely focus on his mission to destroy her.

Robert: It seems like he, in seducing her, was seduced in return — when I say “seduced her,” seduced her towards corruption. Whenever she holds a knife on him, he keeps saying, “I’ve never been so hard.” He clearly is someone who wanted to guide her towards the evil that he thinks is essential for the mother of the Antichrist. But also, he’s kind of fallen for her a bit, because she is sexy when she’s violent. She is sexy when she does mean things, and evil things. So I think Leland has always been a little torn, which is why he has to drink so much of his root beer when he goes there at the end to kill her. And listen to Roger Miller.

In terms of your priorities in bringing the show to a close, what were the questions you felt you had to answer in the series finale?

Michelle: The state of the relationship between David and Kristen and Ben. The state of the Assessors program. What happened to Leland.

Robert: The 60 — what are they about, and what is the future of the 60, whether they’re vanquished or not. To our mind, they’re not an entity that can be vanquished. David’s connection to the Entity, or friends of the Vatican. An inability of the courts to vanquish evil, because Leland’s trial looks like it’s all going well for us, and then — very much in a way you might consider the Supreme Court to be corrupt — the judge stops the key witness from testifying.

What are some things you might’ve addressed if you’d had more time?

Robert: Wally Shawn, and his struggle with his lack of faith — especially with Sister Andrea, because the two of them were so much fun to work with. I would say looking at Wally Shawn, and his love for the monsignor, and is there any peaceful place for him? Which I don’t know if there is.

And Ben — it would be good to see that last time he watches his doppelganger, that he really does think, “I need to start a family.” That’s what we were going for. Because that is Aasif’s real wife and child in that doppelgangers story.

It was?!

Robert: Yeah!

Oh, I love that. I felt Ben’s yearning came through, actually.

Robert: Good! He looks over to the loneliness of his apartment, and he admires this guy who he doesn’t know, obviously. What we wanted to do with those doppelgangers is ease the actors into their real lives, because Katja, of course, is Dutch, so she’s got this Dutch doppelganger singing on the street corners. And then Mike is more known for “Luke Cage,” and to get him back being a kickboxer.

With the Andy storyline, did the success of “Colin From Accounts” mess up any plans you had with Patrick Brammall?

Michelle: Always. I mean, that’s just the reality of series television — that you’re always fighting actor availability, or location availability, or time, or money, or whatever it is. And you have to take that into account in the storytelling. So yes, we adored Patrick. I mean, it was very nice of him to bend his schedule enough to get out to the U.S. to finish up Andy’s story. But he couldn’t have been there the whole time.

Robert: The most we got him was in the third season. We got him for four days, and that was where his story really kind of went to interesting places. I mean, we wished we had a more, but I do think, as Michelle suggested, it’s the nature of the TV show we do — which is we go for the actor, even if their schedule is a pain.

Is the djinn that was tormenting Ben gone?

Michelle: I don’t think you can ever assume in this reality that any demon or djinn is actually conquered. The best you can hope for is a reprieve.

Robert: The thing we were implying is that he was waking up to real life again, now that he was not an assessor. Like, something was haunting them as they were doing this assessment job.

Ben says they were making $65,000 a year as assessors. Why did you want to get that figure into the finale?

Michelle: We wanted to highlight the difference between what he’d making in a new job that wasn’t Church-related, and how much more it was. We looked at a bunch of jobs: what would a police officer make, what would a teacher make — and what would an assessor make. We wanted them to be all in the same world.

Robert: The key would be that these three were clinging to each other because they created a strong bond and friendship — and especially Ben was sacrificing himself a little bit. The show was always a little bit of a fight against capitalism too, or the evils of capitalism.

What was with the Mike Flanagan shoutouts this season, including in the series finale?

Robert: I thought it was funny, but I can’t tell you why I thought it was funny. There’s a few lines in “Midnight Mass” about the thing that is hopeful about life is your atoms join up with the atoms of the universe, and you’re all part of the universe, which I find horrifying. It’s nodding, I think, to someone else who fights in the trenches of what horror is.

Did you originally plan for the show to go a certain number of seasons or was it open ended?

Michelle: It was open ended.

Robert: I think in our dream of dreams, it would be two more seasons.

What was the reason you were given for the show being canceled?

Michelle: You know, the talk is all money at this stage. It’s not lack of affection for the show, or any other thing, it’s that there’s an industry-wide contraction. And it’s certainly being felt at Paramount Global, as you’re seeing with all these layoffs, and shows had to be put to the side.

Robert: I do think, this was before it went on Netflix, the paradigm still seems to be about subscriptions, and a show that has so many episodes, they’re always talking about shelf space — almost like we’re shoe stores. So there’s not enough room to make room for the new shoes, so you push the old shoes to the side. But we kept pursuing it, because we saw that it was doing so well and bringing more attention to the third and then the fourth season on Paramount+, that we kept pushing for more.

But I do think Paramount+ didn’t have its ducks in a row about where it was going, and what was going to be. The safer choice was to cancel it. I don’t know. We would argue it’s a worthy one to bring back, even if it means changing things up slightly to do that.

I agree, of course. How was it that it was four episodes that you were given to finish the series?

Michelle: That was just what they felt they could afford to allow us an opportunity to finish up the story. I think that was a good choice. Ultimately, of course, we would’ve liked another season or two, but the fact that we did get four episodes to create a proper ending, I think we succeeded at that.

Robert: Yeah, I would say that before the strike, there was always the implication that there was going to be more seasons, so we didn’t feel we had to close down at the end of the fourth season before the strike. And then things changed up during the strike. And then George Cheeks and David Stapf told us, “It looks like this will be the last.”

After that, it’s their respect for us and our respect for them — we love collaborating with them — that they said, “We’re thinking four more would give you the chance to end. You didn’t have the chance to end at the end of the fourth season.” And we grabbed at anything. If they said, “We’ll give you one episode, and money for lunch,” we would do that. Anything to allow you to finish a story. Otherwise, it would just be weird. Frigging weird.

When you reconvened after the strike to plan what those four episodes were going to be, how were you balancing bringing the characters to a resolution versus bringing the mythology story to a conclusion, and providing answers for that?

Michelle: Very much both. It was never either/or, they were both priorities.

Robert: You don’t know where one ends and the other begins. We start every season with, “What are our hanging chads? What are the unresolved questions that might even have been head-fakes at the time, or even things we just thought were silly and fun, but the audience had attached more interest to? What do we need to answer?” So you’re always just trying to find a way to answer whatever questions you think the audience has.

But often, the show is built on the idea of that there isn’t a resolution to evil, and the uncanny is something that is best not nailed down 100%. So it’s a fight in the room about what answer raises a new question, and is that a problem, or is that part of the strength of the show?

In the storm episode, which would’ve been just the Season 4 finale, why was that the time to kill Sheryl?

Robert: We went to her about Episode 6 to say that we were aiming this direction. We felt Sheryl had been siloed off from the Kristen story by that intense disappointment in each other. It was hard to resolve that. The room from the very beginning thought Sheryl’s story would be one about her redeeming herself from femme fatale to someone who sacrifices herself in a way. And it did feel like, after the death of Sheryl, you would want a season or even two to see the repercussions after that. Michelle, is there anything else?

Michelle: No, other than we had played out so much of Kristen and Sheryl being at odds, Sheryl working against Kristen, and then there being some rapprochement, that it didn’t feel like one should do it again. There needed to be a little more finality.

The actors have been out there talking about how they’d love to do more, and you’ve both said — even during this interview — you would want to do more. Do you have ideas about what a continuation, were there to be one, would look like?

Michelle: Sure, in that, I mean, none of the characters, with the exception of Sheryl, are dead. They’re in contact. And unfortunately, evil in the world is still going strong, so there’s no sense that it would need to be the end. But that said, I think what we did accomplish hopefully will be satisfying to fans.

Robert: You know, our sense of the fifth season was that we were going to satirize “The Good Wife” and “Good Fight,” in a sense, through the courtroom. So it’s a little bit of abbreviated courtroom that it’s just in the first two episodes, and basically, how hard it is to attack evil through the law or through the justice system. And there were going to be all these permutations about how the legal structure has all these demons within it, just like the third season was about corporate America.

The other thing the season was going to be about was these doppelgangers — that you would see how they’re kind of living another life through them. And we would even go through the looking glass to these other characters, and see how they lived their life, and then bounce back. And it would obviously be done by all our actors, but you would see this other version. It gives you the path not taken. So anyway, we had these fun, fun things planned out, and we still do sock puppets together at night, and do the stories for ourselves, and we’re very entertained.

Zoom me in! Robert, you were directing the series finale; Michelle, I assume you were on set that day. What was the last day like? What was the final scene you shot?

Michelle: When you’re ending any show, it’s always a little not as you would expect, because different people wrap on different days. So it’s not as though the last day that you’re filming is the last day for any particular actor, so it’s kind of a rolling goodbye.

Robert: The only thing that was different this year, unlike “Good Fight,” was they were all in the Vatican scene together. And then, after that, the very last scene shot was Aasif with his sister as she’s dying in the goggles vision. And it was a very good emotional scene to end it on, because we were all near tears — just because this is the last time.

And beyond that, that studio space was very hard to leave, because we’d shot “Good Fight” there, and I think part of “Good Wife,” and there was a hall filled with the signatures of all the guest stars from the show, from Elaine May all the way around. So it was very difficult to see that stuff go away, too.

Now that you’ve had a few months since you finished the final episode, what have you found that you are missing the most about “Evil”?

Robert: The writers’ room and the actors. The writers’ room is so fun. You know, we’d been through a pandemic together, just like “The Good Fight” room, which was so much fun, and everybody talked about the news. Here, the youngest who was obsessed with horror movies, and would tell us everything she saw and knew everything — she was an encyclopedia of it.

Michelle: Nialla LeBouef.

Robert: Yes, Nialla. And then Katja, Mike, and Aasif made the set very fun. And then you put in Andrea Martin!

Michelle: Kurt Fuller!

Robert: It was a dream cast. You know, these shows that throw together a lot of disparate people and put them together, and you’re just counting on the fact that people are all going to swim together in the same direction, and entertain each other. And sometimes it doesn’t work.

This time, it was as good of a group as you could find.

This interview has been edited and condensed.