The fourth and final season of Killing Eve gets underway Sunday (February 27) on BBC America. Critics have long adored the edgy spy drama about a bored M15 agent, a ruthless assassin and the peculiar attraction they have to one another.
All eyes are now on Eve to see if it can pull off a fittingly stylish finale.
Dan McDermott, AMC Networks president of entertainment and AMC Studios, called the final season “a real thrill ride.” The hard part of successfully wrapping, he said, “is really figuring out how to appropriately service both the roles and the actresses and the narratives, to finish with the gigantic thunderclap the show deserves.”
“I feel really positive that the show does it,” McDermott added.
It’s been an eventful lifespan for Killing Eve. The show was created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and has two female characters as the heart of the series — Sandra Oh’s Eve, an intelligence agent, bored behind a desk, and Jodie Comer’s Villanelle, a mercurial assassin.
An odd thing happened in season one. The premiere on BBC America drew 669,000 total viewers in Nielsen live-plus-three-day ratings and 240,000 viewers in the 25-54 demo. The show grew each week with the finale tallying
1.2 million total viewers, 545,000 in the demo.
Killing Eve took several bold leaps. For starters, it was created by a woman, run by women and had two female characters sharing center stage. It was a spy drama with a pair of unforgettable characters. “It really flipped the script on suspense-thriller shows and spy shows,” said McDermott, who came on board at AMC Networks in 2020. “It’s such a strong, character-centric approach to telling these stories. So many shows like this are really plot-heavy.”
McDermott describes both Eve and Villanelle as “lightning-in-a-bottle characters.”
The show also cast an Asian actor, Oh, as Eve. Linda Ong, founder and CEO of consultancy Cultique, called it “a maverick move,” as the Eve in the Luke Jennings novellas that inspired the show is not Asian.
The maverick move went beyond casting. “Eve was presented as an equal opponent to the white Villanelle, rather than the meek, subservient Asian trope we’ve seen for — literally — centuries, juxtaposing their enmity with all of the drama and intrigue of a traditional romantic relationship,” Ong said.
The Eve buzz continued in the second season. Airing on AMC in addition to BBC America, season two averaged 1.7 million total viewers and 675,000 in the 25-54 demo. Season three averaged 1.5 million and 573,000.
Finding the Show’s Voice
Killing Eve also made its mark by featuring a new lead writer each season, and a female one to boot. Season one had Waller-Bridge in that role. Emerald Fennell and Suzanne Heathcote followed, and Laura Neal has the key role for season four.
The quirky lead-writer approach came to be because Waller-Bridge had to focus on a new season of Fleabag after Killing Eve premiered. “Rather foolishly, we decided to go with a different lead writer every season,” executive producer and showrunner Sally Woodward Gentle said. That amounted to “holding dear the DNA of the show,” she said, “while bringing a slightly different perspective on it.”
The approach has been “refreshing” for the series, Woodward Gentle said.
Unlike her predecessors, Neal worked on the previous season of Killing Eve and knows the series intimately. “She’s very invested in where we’d left those characters and very excited about where we are moving them off to,” Woodward Gentle said. “She’s brilliant, very bold, takes no prisoners, and understands the particular humor of the show.”
As season four begins, Eve seeks revenge and Villanelle has found a new community to break from her killer past. Woodward Gentle said both are “really trying to take stock of what their lives mean and what they want to do with them.”
So why end the hit show after four seasons? The critical raves have subsided a bit — season one posted a 96% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, season two a 92% and season three an 80% — but the reviews have remained mostly positive. McDermott said AMC Networks would love to keep it going, but the storylines
in season four bring it to what he called “a fitting conclusion.”
“You kind of know when you know,” he said.
Woodward Gentle said a “continual cat-and-mouse game,” even a clever one, loses its allure over time.
Making a Killing
Killing Eve’s value to BBC America is hard to quantify. A hit show brings eyeballs to the network’s other programs, elicits honors and awards and entices top-shelf producers and their projects. McDermott said Eve and Villanelle have earned their spot in the AMC Networks hall of fame, alongside the likes of Don Draper and Walter White.
Breakout shows have those lightning-in-a-bottle characters who take audiences into unique subcultures, McDermott said. They say something about the world we live in. “Killing Eve checks all three boxes,” he said.
What from AMC Networks has a chance to be the next show to shake up popular culture? McDermott mentioned Dark Winds, about a pair of Navajo police officers on the hunt in 1971, and Moonhaven, about a utopian community on the moon, along with the Anne Rice projects Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches. “In the next 12-18 months, those can put us in the awards conversation all over again,” he said.
In the meantime, viewers have unseen Eve episodes to enjoy. There are eight in season four, which run on BBC America, AMC and AMC Plus. Ong described the show as “one of the first highly stylized thrillers that defied traditional gender and racial norms.” On top of that, she added, “infusing the male-led spy genre with female and queer desire and sexuality lent a deliciously exoticized take on the ‘cat and mouse’ plot.” ■
