Flashback: the Exorcist TV series (2016-2017)
How do you build mood and suspense with constant commercial breaks? And can you have a fitting climax in an exorcism story without a deus ex machina?
Two days ago, I wrote about the original movie. Yesterday, I wrote about the first two sequels and the first two prequels. Now, I’m going to write about the TV spin-off version of The Exorcist, which aired on the Fox network just a few years ago.
I wasn’t really much of a TV watcher when the show first aired, but Covid changed all that. Stuck at home with time to kill, and with very few new movies to watch, I started to catch up on a number of the critically-acclaimed shows I’d heard about (The Leftovers, Hannibal, Watchmen, Black Mirror, etc.). I also started to watch some shows that were not so acclaimed. And somewhere along the way, I noticed that the Exorcist TV series was on Netflix, and since I’d always been interested in the movies…
I wasn’t planning to review the series, but I did find a few episodes just stimulating enough to write about them on my private Facebook page. Now, with a new Exorcist movie coming out today, I figured I’d re-post those comments here at Substack.
The posts below were all written between August 4 and August 23, 2020:
August 4, 2020
The Exorcist S01E01: One of the advantages of feature film is that you can tell an entire story in one sitting and, thus, set your own pace. But stretching a story over multiple episodes means breaking the story down into chunks that end on episode-ending cliffhangers, and—if you’re writing the show for an ad-supported network—breaking each episode down into even smaller chunks that end on even smaller cliffhangers.
And so, whereas the 1973 movie The Exorcist was able to build its characters and build up suspense for quite some time, the 2016 TV series has to accelerate things. In the movie, the mother doesn’t meet the priest and tell him her daughter is possessed until 74 minutes in—until the movie is more than half over—but there are ten episodes in the first season of the series, and the writers obviously can’t stretch out the girl’s diagnosis for a full five or six episodes. And so, in the series, the mother is asking for help only 18 minutes in. And the entire season has a total runtime of 413 minutes!
Maybe this series will go the Hannibal route and have multiple exorcisms per season, the way Hannibal had multiple taxidermically- and/or cannibalistically-inclined serial killers. That’s going to get awful repetitive, though. But what’s the alternative? Stretching out a single person’s exorcism over an entire season? I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
And yes, I did notice the brief glimpse of the website that mentions the events of the 1973 film. So this series doesn’t waste any time establishing that it’s in the same universe as that movie, on some level. I gather that there will be even more direct connections down the road, but I’ll wait and see what they are.
August 8, 2020
The Exorcist S01E05: Oh, so that’s the connection between the original movie and the TV series. Hmmm.
Brief interjection: I’m referring, here, to the fact that this episode reveals that Angela Rance (the mom played by Geena Davis) is actually Regan MacNeil, the girl who was possessed in the original film and is now a middle-aged woman.
This episode also introduces Regan/Angela’s mother Chris, who was played by Ellen Burstyn in the movie and is now played by Sharon Gless.
Sharon Gless is 11 years younger than Ellen Burstyn, so I’m not sure about the timeline here... but Geena Davis is three years (and one day!) older than Linda Blair, so that kinda checks out, at least. (Burstyn is 26 years older than Blair, but Gless is less than 13 years older than Davis, which is silly.)
The question is whether Gless is supposed to be playing older than her age or Davis is supposed to be playing younger than her age. Given that Davis was 60 when the series premiered and she’s playing the mother of teenaged girls... I’m inclined to say Davis is playing younger, which would mean the timeline has been shifted so that the original movie must have taken place maybe a decade after it came out.
(Alan Ruck, who plays Davis’s husband and the father of their girls, is almost exactly the same age as Davis—just a few months younger, actually. Which shocks me, frankly, as it means he turned 30 the year Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out—i.e. he turned 30 the year he became famous for playing a high-school student. Actors in their early 20s playing high-schoolers, I get. Actors who are almost 30, though...? And I thought 27-year-old Tom Cruise was stretching things by playing his character as a teenager in the early scenes of Born on the Fourth of July...)
August 9, 2020
The Exorcist S01E06: The previous episode ended by revealing that Angela (Geena Davis) is actually the grown-up version of Regan MacNeil, the girl who was possessed in the 1973 film.
In that episode, Angela/Regan said she changed her name after her mother exploited their story by writing a famous book about their ordeal. But the mother’s actions, as reported, sounded completely out of character to me, because the film made a point of showing how embarrassed she was by her daughter’s situation, and how she tried to keep it secret.
This episode fills in a little more back-story, and reveals that the mother, a Hollywood actress, was dropped by her movie studio after the possession became a “scandal”, and she wrote the book because she had no money and she needed to make an income somehow...
That explanation seems somewhat plausible to me, so, okay, I’ll go with it. Though I’m curious as to how the possession became a scandal. I guess when you’re a famous movie star and a priest goes flying out your window to his death, it makes sense that eventually someone would snoop around and figure something out, though it would have been easier to keep stories like this suppressed in those pre-internet days.
Incidentally, we get a glimpse of some late ’70s (or early ’80s?) talk show that the MacNeils appeared on to promote the book, and the 16-year-old actress they got to play the young Regan (someone named Sophie Thatcher) is very believable as a young Geena Davis.
Also, it’s funny to see that the Exorcist franchise has now contradicted the Linda-Blair-sequel part of 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, just as 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning and 2005’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist contradicted the Max-von-Sydow-prequel part of Exorcist II. (1990’s The Exorcist III ignored Exorcist II, as it followed the trajectory of a completely different character from the original film, but I don’t think it contradicted Exorcist II, per se.)
August 11, 2020
The Exorcist S01E08: I wondered earlier if the series had shifted the timeline of the original 1973 film at all, given that the series premiered in 2016 and it posits that Regan MacNeil, the 12-year-old girl from the original film, is now the mother of teenaged girls.
If Regan was truly 43 years older now, then it would mean her daughters were born when she was in her late 30s—which is not impossible, but could be perhaps a bit of a stretch, and in any case, Sharon Gless, the actress playing Regan’s mother in this series, is only 12-and-a-half years older than Geena Davis, the actress playing the older Regan. So obviously either Gless was playing older than her age or Davis was playing younger. (Actually, Davis is playing younger than her age in any case, as she was almost 18 when the 1973 film came out.)
This episode hints strongly that, yes, the events of the original film are still set in the early 1970s. There’s a flashback scene in which the adult Regan revisits one of her younger self’s encounters with “Captain Howdy”, and the songs that play in the background—Chicory Tip’s ‘Son of My Father’ and Ricky Nelson’s ‘Garden Party’—both came out in 1972.
However, just to complicate things a wee bit, young Regan is played once again by Sophie Thatcher, who played young Regan in an earlier episode, in a clip of an interview that she and her mom did to promote a book about the events of the first movie. Thatcher was around 16 when these episodes were shot, which was fine in the earlier episode—it can take a few years to write and publish a book, especially if one doesn’t write it until after one’s existing career has fallen apart—but it makes her a few years older than the 12-year-old character she’s playing in this episode. (Four years can make a huge difference in one’s early to mid teens. Just look at how Linda Blair grew between 1973’s The Exorcist and 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic.)
But hey, I can roll with it, for the purposes of this series. The age gap is a minor thing compared to the need for continuity—the need to feel an emotional connection to the character between episodes—and I do marvel, once again, at how perfectly cast Thatcher is as a young Davis.
Beyond that: It was hinted very early on that this series was going to take the franchise into newer, larger territory, as apparently the Pope (a fictitious liberal Francis-type character) is planning to come to Chicago. The last few episodes have revealed that members of the Catholic hierarchy within Chicago (and elsewhere) are part of some demonically-influenced conspiracy related to this visit. So there’s church politics and all other sorts of “epic” stuff involved here that the earlier films didn’t care about at all.
(It vaguely reminds me of how what started as a little neighbourhood crime-family drama in The Godfather grew into a major Vatican conspiracy by The Godfather Part III. It even kinda vaguely reminds me of how Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom—the fifth film in that series—introduced outright murder and other stuff that had not been part of the franchise until then. It represents something of a shift, tone- and genre-wise.)
(Oh, and for what it’s worth, Pope John Paul II was the first Pope to visit Chicago, in 1979. I don’t know if either of his real-life successors have ever visited that city.)
August 13, 2020
Finished the first season of The Exorcist this morning.
The conclusions to supernatural stories like these are always tricky, for a couple of reasons. I once attended a seminar (at a Christian arts festival) where a screenwriter said the climax to a story always has to be the result of a choice made by the protagonist. He said he would have given Raiders of the Lost Ark a failing grade because Indiana Jones ultimately had nothing to do with the fate of the villains, and the story climaxed with a deus ex machina. I told the screenwriter afterwards that Indy did make his choice, when he chose not to blow up the Ark, and that Indy’s choice was to submit himself to the mystery of the Ark. Yes, the “deus ex machina” can be a lousy way to wrap things up, but in the case of Raiders, the whole point—foreshadowed in dialogue throughout the film—was that God himself was “in the machine”, as it were, and that God was not something that the other characters could control. The screenwriter replied that I was being “academic”.
Anyway. I bring that story up here because it seems to me that any story about exorcism ultimately has to be a story about divine intervention, and it cannot be a story in which (a) divine power is manipulated by people, or (b) human power takes the place of divine power. But how can you make satisfying drama out of that? How can you tell a story that ends on time, after the right number of narrative beats? The original 1973 film version of The Exorcist “cheats” by having one of the priests trick the demon into possessing him and then jump out the window, killing himself and apparently taking the demon with him (at least until the sequels and/or the TV series). The conclusion to that story ultimately rests on human power and a form of physical violence, albeit self-sacrificial violence.
And now the TV series climaxes with another act of physical violence, in which one of the two exorcists cuts the throat of a possessed priest using a sort of makeshift crucifix (while the other exorcist performs a more conventional kind of exorcism on Angela/Regan). This reminds me of a film I saw recently (2019’s The Curse of La Llorona, I think?) in which a ghost or demon is stabbed with a crucifix; the symbol of how God submitted himself to violence has now become an instrument of physical violence itself. But this TV series aired in 2016, so it got there first (though I wouldn’t be surprised if other films or TV shows had used crosses and crucifixes that way before).
There is also a scene in which one of Angela/Regan’s daughters tells the demon something like, “You got your butt kicked by a 12-year-old girl,” i.e. by Regan when Regan was a girl in the original film. But is that an even remotely accurate description of what happened in the original film? Did Regan kick the demon’s butt? Or was Regan saved by other people? Once again, screenwriting convention dictates that the protagonists have to be the active drivers of their own fates, and this idea that Regan kicked the demon’s butt is underscored, in this episode, by metaphorical scenes that take place inside Regan’s head, as it were, as she defeats the demon on the inside while the priest is performing the exorcism on the outside.
Anyway. It appears the Rance family story is resolved now, and the two priests who saved them (plus a third priest who dealt with them) are going to go and have another adventure or two in Season 2. (Each season has ten episodes, and the IMDb indicates that there are only four actors who appear in more than ten: the three priests, who appear in all twenty episodes, and one of Regan’s daughters, who appears in eleven.)
I wasn’t planning to write all that just now; I was going to say something pithier about the fact that I had finished Season 1 of The Exorcist, and I was three episodes into Watchmen, and my gosh I was actually enjoying and looking forward to watching these shows every morning, after the long, chore-like slog that Hannibal became, for me. (Hannibal soured me so much on critically-acclaimed dramatic TV that I actually kind of dreaded turning to these other dark-and-gritty franchise reboots, but they have redeemed the genre, for me.) But anyway. I finished Season 1 of The Exorcist, and I had thoughts. (As for Watchmen, I’ve got six episodes to go, so I can get into any thoughts I might have about that series later.)
August 14, 2020
Started watching Season 2 of The Exorcist this morning, and had that weird experience where I think, “Hmmm, where was this shot, again?” and then I look it up and learn that, yes, the series was shot in Vancouver. Just in Season 2, though. Season 1 was set and shot in Chicago, but Season 2 is set in Montana and Washington... so of course it was filmed in Vancouver. (Is it possible that I “recognized” the locations because I heard about the series being shot here at the time, and I retained some sort of subconscious memory of this fact? Possibly, though I wasn’t paying any attention to the series back then.)
August 23, 2020
Finished the second and final season of the Exorcist TV series today. I wasn’t all that invested in it, so I didn’t comment much (if at all) on the individual episodes. But, a few thoughts on the season as a whole, if I may:
First, I appreciated how the early episodes kept us guessing as to who, exactly, the primary possessed person would be this season. They did this in at least two ways:
First, they divided the narrative between the Marcus-Tomas duo on the one hand and a family of foster kids led by John Cho’s character on the other hand—and in the early episodes, they have the Marcus-Tomas duo dealing with a girl whose possession, it turns out, is not genuine but has been faked by her mother. The original movie (and the novel it is based on) made a point of noting that exorcists have to exhaust all the natural explanations for a person’s seemingly demonic behaviour before they turn to supernatural explanations, and I appreciated that there was a story in this franchise in which the alleged possession turns out to have a purely natural explanation after all (and, indeed, it turns out to be worse than a merely natural phenomenon; it is a hoax, and a sign of abuse on the parent’s part).
But, second, we knew that the main story this season wouldn’t really be about that girl anyway, because the main star this season was John Cho (he is to Season 2 what Geena Davis was to Season 1, movie-star-wise)... and, because Cho’s character is a foster parent to several kids, the series keeps us guessing as to which of these kids will be the Linda Blair of this season... assuming, that is, that the Linda Blair of this season is actually one of the kids and not Cho himself (remember, if you will, how Season 1 led us to think that Davis’s daughter would be the Linda Blair of that season, and then we discovered that Davis herself was the character that Linda Blair had played in the original movie!).
So, some clever writing there, as far as the set-up goes. But once all the pieces are on the board—about halfway through the season—we get another round of priests telling the possessed person to “fight” the demon, and scenes that take place inside the possessed person’s mind, and a climax in which the only way to get rid of a demon just might be to kill the person it’s possessing (but with that person’s approval!). (I mean, okay, Fr Karras’s suicide in the original movie does kind of set a precedent for the idea that you defeat a demon by killing the person it’s possessing, but still...)
Season 2 also strings out the larger conspiracy in which a bunch of demon-possessed people at the Vatican are trying to shut down the church’s exorcism branch, or something like that. In hindsight, it just seems weird that the conspirators put so much effort into planning an assassination against the Pope during his visit to Chicago... If the demons have infiltrated the Vatican itself, and if they had really wanted to kill the Pope, why not just do it there? (Side note: Season 1 implied that the Pope was a quasi-populist Francis-like figure, who presumably has nothing to do with these conspirators—so is the Vatican conspiracy against him kind of like the “Deep State” that is supposedly working against Trump?)
The season was set in Washington state, but it was filmed in Vancouver, and the final scene appears to be set in Vancouver, inasmuch as you can clearly see Canada Place in the background—they’re not trying to hide it at all! If the series hadn’t been cancelled, I wonder if a third season would have clarified that, yes, the final scene did in fact take place here.
Oh, and there’s another scene near the very end of the series in which the camera looks down a hallway in a hospital while a nurse calmly goes about her business. I sat up as soon as that scene began and wondered if the series was paying homage to a particularly famous jump scare in The Exorcist III—and yes, dear reader, it was. As far as I can recall, that is the only time this series paid any attention to the other Exorcist sequels. I assume the series is ignoring those sequels on a narrative level, the same way the movie sequels all ignore each other,* but it was nice to see the series make a visual nod to what is arguably the best of the movie sequels.
*Re: the sequels ignoring each other, the original 1973 movie mentions that Fr Merrin (the Max von Sydow character) confronted the demon of that film some years ago in Africa, and that back-story was fleshed out in no fewer than three of the films that followed (1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning and 2005’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist), and all three films told significantly different versions of that back-story. 1990’s The Exorcist III was the only sequel (prior to this TV series) that simply ignored Fr Merrin’s back-story.
And, that about covers it.
The newest film in the franchise, The Exorcist: Believer, is coming to theatres tonight. I don’t know how soon I’ll be able to see it, and I don’t know whether I’ll feel like writing about it when I do, but see it I will, no matter how brutal the reviews get.