A badass English Exorcist and his Mexican sidekick battle demons and Catholic conspiracy in 2016's The Exorcist. This Fox series is a direct sequel to the 1973 William Friedkin movie. It lacks the subtlety and sense of realism of that excellent film, owing more of its tone to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some of the pulpier episodes of The X-Files though its opening theme was clearly inspired by True Detective. For that kind of series, it's not bad at all and features a surprisingly good performance from Geena Davis.
The protagonists are Marcus (Ben Daniels) and Tomas (Alfonso Herrera). Marcus is the experienced and scarred old exorcist whom we meet losing a child to a demon. Tomas is a local priest in Chicago where the show's first season was shot and set.
I enjoyed Daniels' antagonistic performance, making Marcus a man whose patience is reserved entirely for the sick chambers of possessed children. I didn't really like Tomas who gives in very easily to a tryst with a young married woman. Maybe if the woman had been fleshed out a bit more I'd have appreciated it as a believable character flaw but mostly he just seems of weaker will than the show would like me to believe.
Geena Davis plays the mother of Casey (Hannah Kasulka), the girl possessed by a demon. Alan Ruck--Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off--plays Davis' husband who recently had a brain injury that prevents him from accessing certain memories and occasionally impairs his speech. His character also serves as a conduit for the supernatural in a few interesting moments.
There are times in the series where it feels like the writers are killing time, especially early on in circular scenes of people trying to convince people an exorcist needs to happen, that Casey's problems go beyond mental illness. The family needs to be convinced or is trying to convince, the priests try to convince each other, and the church officials also need convincing. But I can understand the difficulty for the writers. What can you do when the actual action of the exorcism involves priests shouting scripture at a writhing and puking kid? The original film succeeds so well by establishing a sense of a real family and the deep violation of their shared reality perpetrated by the demon. The series never feels like real life, just comic book/soap opera life, which, to the writers' credit, is about as high as I think they consciously aspired to. So they had to throw in some more lurid plot details like nuns who keep gardens of belladonna and gangs of organ harvesters.
It's fun. I would single out episode five, the only one written by David Grimm, as an exceptionally eerie episode in which characters trapped in a house together play off each other nicely.
The Exorcist is available on Hulu.
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