‘Evil’: Kings Talk Hopes for Save, What Would Have Happened in Season 5

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Evil series finale “Fear of the End.”]

Should Evil be saved following its Paramount+ cancellation, creators Robert and Michelle King certainly left enough doors wide open for the story to continue—and that was on purpose.

In the finale, David (Mike Colter) and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) stop Kristen (Katja Herbers) from killing Leland (Michael Emerson), who’s then locked away in a cabinet in the silent monastery. Meanwhile, Ben takes a new job, Kristen takes her daughters to Rome to continue assessing with David, and baby Timothy gets a little demonic

Below, the Kings share their hopes for more Evil, what we would’ve seen in a fifth season, and more. Plus, read a full breakdown of the series finale with the Kings here.

Talk about landing on that ending for the series because it does leave the door open for more.

Michelle King: Well, alas, there is still evil in the world, so that means there are still stories about evil in the world, and we certainly wanted to leave ourselves an opportunity to tell those should there be that chance. But that said, we really wanted to end the show in a way that was satisfying to us as well as an audience, and hence the ending you saw.

Elizabeth Fisher / Paramount+

What can you share about what we would’ve seen in Season 5?

Robert King: You saw a little of it in the first two episodes. We were going to do more with court and the court system and how demonic it can be. There were going to be more demons kind of infecting the courthouse and Kristen was going to have to be much more involved. All three would have to testify. We were trying to satirize the work we did in Good Wife and Good Fight. So we were even going to pull in—we did bring in Richard Kind—a lot more of the actors from Good Wife and Good Fight and kind of show, hopefully in a very meta way, self-reflecting of—a lot of the buildup of those shows was how justice can go wrong. But in the world where there is evil, how much of it going wrong is in the human makeup or in the demonic makeup of the show?

Richard Kind and John Carroll Lynch—great casting.

Robert: We’ve been wanting to work with John Carroll Lynch forever, since Zodiac, before Zodiac. But he was so good in that. And the other thing we were going to do more of is the doppelgängers, which were going to have a life of their own in the show.

With the show canceled and then ending with these four bonus episodes, was there anything that was part of them that you eventually wanted to include in the series finale when you got to it that you then just moved up?

Robert: I don’t remember. Michelle?

Michelle: [Shakes head] Sorry.

What do you think the chances are of getting a revival, a spinoff of any kind? There needs to be more of this show.

Michelle: That’s a wonderful question for somebody with a different job title than ours.

Robert: I mean, look, we’re here, we have our ideas for the future episodes. If Paramount+ or Netflix or Amazon Prime don’t want to pay for ’em, we’ll just probably do it with sock puppets at home because we are enamored with the show and wanted to keep doing it. But we’re also realists. We do know that post-strike and post the Wall Street reevaluation of what streaming is that the paradigm has shifted of what you can do. And I don’t know why because our show is doing incredibly well, but timing is a bitch.

Are there any specific ideas you can share about what we could see if it’s continued in any way?

Michelle: No, but I look forward to having that interview with you.

Robert: Yeah.

Was there a world in which Sheryl (Christine Lahti) could have survived given everything that happened?

Michelle: Probably not. Story-wise, she’s burned so many bridges with Kristen. There wasn’t really a realistic thing to play where they’re in each other’s lives, and it’s hard to have characters that have to because of story reasons stay apart when one of them is the lead of the show.

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Something that’s entirely unique to this show are those skip messages in the intro. Do each of you have a favorite?

Robert: I like the “Don’t skip the intro or the show will be canceled,” and then “Oops.” Yeah, that one is probably your favorite. Michelle?

Michelle: I just think the fact that we were allowed to do that is so ludicrous that I like all of them.

Robert: I also like the knock knock one, which is kind of stupid, but the best was, this lady in Sun Valley skipped the intro and lost all her hair. For a while there, we were going to have each one mention somebody else in the world who skipped an intro and had issues.

If you had known going into Season 4 that these 14 episodes were going to be it, at least for now, is there anything you wish you had done more of or done in addition to what you did?

Michelle: I’ll speak just for myself. I actually am really happy with the way it turned out. I think we got to tell an awful lot of stories, and given that we did find out four episodes prior that we were putting an end to the story, I feel like we were able to do that in a way that honored it.

Robert: The only thing I’d add is the things I just mentioned, which is I really love that doppelgänger story because it’s a movement of our actors into their real people. Katja is Dutch. In that scene, that’s Aasif’s real wife and his real son. It was kind of like very meta, but in many ways their doppelgängers were versions of the real people they are, and that just felt like a fun thing to explore over the course of a season.

I would’ve liked to see Leland’s doppelgänger.

Robert: Oh my God, you’re right. We did have—remember that very first season we were going to kill him at the end of the first season, and yet his doppelgänger in Des Moines, who’s an insurance adjuster, pops up and starts taking over for him. We really were into the idea of doubles then.

Evil, Streaming now, Paramount+