1 out of 5

Created by: Daria Polatin

I had been crafting a narrative here about how Devil in Ohio, despite having some constructional merit – a workable concept with a Satanic Panic hook; some broadly logical character connections – completely falls flat due to creator and co-showrunner Daria Polatin probably fumbling the TV format when trying to port their own book into a series. …Except this isn’t Polatin’s first time at the TV rodeo, even if it is their first created-by title. However, I still think this has some attribution to the show’s lackings, and probably also underlines why it has those merits: adopting a book is not an easy task, and perhaps especially when it’s your own baby; so I wouldn’t throw the written Devil in Ohio baby out with the bathwater of its televised version, as anything that seems like it could’ve / should’ve worked here certainly stems from that text. But, as presented, Devil in Ohio is a show in which almost nothing matters. The very premise – hospital psych Suzanne Mathis (Emily Deschanel) decides to temporarily house a runaway teen, Mae (Madeleine Arthur), discovering Mae’s connections to a local cult – is presented so tepidly, relying solely on pointless jump scares and cutaways to Satan folk doing things with animal masks to conjure up spooks and hopeful interest; the script rarely leads us into the story, rather just offering up Mae as a kooky cypher who says cryptic things, then piles on unlinked subplots and barely-there characterization for eight episodes.

Standing back, you can see how this approach worked better in a book, when we can have an internal narrative and perhaps spend more time with characters who, on screen, are almost an AI-level of tropes; the very game actors look good and hit their marks, but their arcs are constructed of mini dramas taken from a kind of timeless pile of TV “issues:” the popular sister and the dorky sister; the husband with financial problems, lying to his wife; the new tuff city cop who’s butting heads with this small town precinct… While generic storylines are not an immediate sin in TV (it’s a timeless pile for a reason), and, again, pacing and narration can help smooth that out in a book, Devil in Ohio’s version of this is devoid of personality, perfunctorily piecing these “move character A to position B” sequences and linearly stringing them together with cringingly trite dialogue. Yes, some of this is how a story outline works, but I don’t think we’re supposed to feel like we’re just reading the story outline aloud and with temped-in conversations.

Several seasoned TV directors are stacked up and can’t do much with this, leaning into the spooky stuff when this probably would’ve been more effective as a straight drama that eventually veered supernatural. It’s a series that doesn’t have twists, but assumes it should, hence the reliance on jump scares and the like: episodes are all about the promise of something in the story that simply isn’t there, reflected further in how surface level everyone’s job is: Suzanne just kind of… works at the hospital, presumably as a psychologist but lacking in some presumably basic tenets of empathy, because she’s really just a dialogue machine; her husband, Peter (Sam Jaeger) is a real estate developer, but only in the sense that he hangs around houses; the cop who ends up trying to investigate the cult (Gerardo Celasco) either has free reign or the chief breathing down his neck, because who has time to research how his job might actually work?; and the satanists (let’s call that a job) use a scrawly anarchy symbol and invert crosses and boyo, that’s some evil shit.

Lack of research is, again, not a unique problem, but from start to finish – from the way the story is paced, to the way it awkwardly hits forced beats, to the way its shells of characters mumble irrelevant dialogue until they can state the sole important detail that cuts us to the next scene… – every aspect of Devil in Ohio’s narrative is shallowly executed, leaving talented actors and directors with almost nothing to work with but to try to pick at our memories of Midsommar or Servant while the story builds to an unfortunately comically bereft of tension conclusion.