New TV series, The Exorcist, Is Better Than Most In Its Genre.

 It's as if some marketing analyst ten years ago decided that "the paranormal is trending," and all then all bets were off.  Anybody with a camera was attempting to make some creepy horror movie about other-worldly forces, and anybody with a blog was coming up with bizarre conspiracies about an evil  Illuminati that was magically controlling the world.  It was not enough anymore to just speculate and hypothesize about the mysteries of this world, the American audience needed to see exactly what these surreal scenarios would look like on the screen.   Demonic possession fell somewhat  into this category  as well, and the result was a lot of really bad movies -not to mention the ubiquitous occurrence of it in popular culture, even if for no other reason than scientifically jeer.  The ludicrous Satanic panic of the 1980s and 90s might have been the final straw in marginalizing the subject, but after enough time had passed, a new public hunger for supernatural battles emerged.  Shows like Supernatural and Resurrection raised the good vs. evil to higher, if not absurd, levels.  But some wanted something closer to home, something more believable, less fantastic.   And a new slew of exorcism movies was thrust into the increasingly popular on-demand viewing market: many of these tried hard to root themselves in a grounding of realism.     Some came close to capturing the excitement of the original The Exorcist movie, like The Rite (2011), starring Anthony Hopkins, but most were by and large sub-par, mediocre films. 

   Regardless of the reasons leading up to The Exorcist becoming a TV series, it emerges on the heels of a lot of really bad spin-offs.   Thankfully, this show is not one of them.  In fact, I would venture to say it's the best video narrative on the subject matter to date.   Drawing from the source material of William Peter Blatty's book, this series deeply explores an interconnected world of church corruption, gang violence, dysfunctional families,  monetary bribes, and, thankfully, a few good people trying to do the right thing.  So far, it has not veered into fanatic theological territory; rather, the story here is more palatable with contemporary church  than the movies in the original franchise.  

   However, it may not be for some, especially those who have been wounded by or turned off from religion altogether, because Catholicism remains central to the plot.  Yet whether or not these events have much of a foundation in real life (as author Malachi Martin claimed in his book, Hostage To The Devil), one thing is certain: the characters in this show are recognizable and very human.  Priests play around with heretical humor at times, while others are flat-out pawns of a larger political system.  Divinity school drop-outs play supporting roles as tour guides on a bus showing the ghost stories and dark history of the city.   And the main protagonist priest has a difficult time with celibacy.  The acting, for the most part, is well-crafted and on point: there is something visually soothing about the lonely shadows of Chicago captured at night, and this show is definitely one I look forward to every week.  
-CLINT SABOM