'Evil' Is a Dad Show About a Mom
Shorty chose to be with a demon, sounds like her problem to me ha ha
It’s rare, but under certain circumstances Dad Shows can be about women.
In order for it to happen, the main Dad Show main character criteria have to be met. She has to be Cool, but also Bad, in the morally gray sense. She has to be willing to do anything to protect her family. She has to be really good at her job – which has to be in a male-dominated field. She has to be smart and good with a wisecrack. To paraphrase an old expression, she has to do everything Ray Donovan does, but backwards and in heels.
Evil’s Kristen Bouchard fits this description.
If you are unfamiliar with Evil, I am very excited for you to get to watch it for the first time. It’s my favorite current ongoing drama, and one of the best shows on TV. It returns to Paramount+ for its fourth and final season today.
Evil follows a trio of investigators who examine reports of demonic incidents for the Catholic Church to determine if they’re real or not. The team is David Acosta, a priest played by Mike Colter; Ben Shakir, a technical expert played by Aasif Mandvi; and Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist played by Katja Herbers. David’s a believer, while Ben and Kristen are skeptics. Together, they go all over New York City (mostly Queens) and Long Island investigating possible supernatural events. The results are generally inconclusive, but they demons are leaning towards real these days.
The show is a semi-procedural where the characters work on new cases every episode but also have ongoing season- and series-long arcs. It was created by Robert and Michelle King, who previously created The Good Wife. It’s smart and funny and sexy and scary. It has thought-provoking things to say about digitally mediated contemporary American life. It has excellent set design.
These are the adjectives that describe why Evil is great. But they do not explain why Evil is a Dad Show.
Evil Dad
Evil is a Dad Show because Kristen Bouchard killed a man with an ice axe when he threatened her family. She did it preemptively, and she would do it again. Her husband Andy is away a lot – either working as a mountaineering guide or being held as a comatose prisoner by Kristen’s enemy Leland – so she has to be both a mother and a father to her four daughters. She’s highly competent in everything she does.
Kristen is part of a co-protagonist duo with David, which keeps viewers from being able to intuitively sort the show by gender. If the point-of-view character was just a man or just a woman, or two men and two women, viewers could say “oh, this is for men (or women).” But the dual main character structure confounds that kind of unconscious bias (as does the supernatural mystery-solving genre, which has cross-gender appeal). Both of these things are some of the many tricks Evil borrowed from The X-Files.
The way Evil is constructed frees it up to be a different type of Dad Show. With two main characters, one of them can be the Avatar of Dadness, and it doesn’t have to be the man. David may be a Father, but he’s not a Dad. He’s head-in-the-clouds, not boots-on-the-ground. Kristen is the gritty one.
Even within the small subset of female Dad Show stars, Kristen is unique. She isn’t a “badass” action hero (their word, not mine) who knows her way around a gun. There isn’t ironic tension between who she is and what she does (a female drug lord, for example). She’s feminine and playful. She is a pretty typical working professional New York City mom in a lot of ways, demonic infestations notwithstanding. Main characters like Kristen are usually the province of Mom Shows. But she’s smart, funny, and tough, which Dads of all genders aspire to be.
(Special thanks to my wife Hannah, who observed that Evil fits the criteria for a Dad Show long before I did.)
Your mind is huge.