Robert and Michelle King Talk Avoiding ‘Exorcism of the Week’ in New CBS Series ‘Evil’

Joe Otterson

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“Evil” creators and showrunners Robert and Michelle King discussed how their new CBS series will not be a typical procedural during the Television Critics Association summer press tour on Thursday.

“We want to avoid an exorcism of the week,” Robert said, referring to the demon possession storyline featured in the pilot. “The second episode is about miracles…It’s about those question marks in life where you don’t know what happened.”

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The Kings also said the idea for the series was born out of conversations about religion and the nature of evil that they have been having for decades.

“We’ve been writing it for the last year and researching it for the last 30,” Michelle said. “You’re looking at the result of a conversation we are still having.”

“Evil” focuses on a skeptical female psychologist (Katja Herbers) who joins a priest-in-training (Mike Colter) and a carpenter (Aasif Mandvi) as they investigate the Church’s backlog of unexplained mysteries, including supposed miracles, demonic possessions and hauntings. Their job is to assess if there is a logical explanation or if something truly supernatural is at work.

The Kings went on to say that not every mystery tackled on the show will not be definitively supernatural or not, but rather they are trying to keep things “a little more vague.”

“I hope we’re trying to say that it’s not just a binary thing,” Robert said.

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