I thought about saving Devil in Ohio for the 31 Days of Halloween but it doesn’t really fit the vibe I’m going for with the October reviews. I was hoping that the series would be more scary or thrilling. But let me tell you more about it first.

Suzanne (Emily Deschanel) is a hospital psychiatrist. When a trauma patient comes in, Suzanne takes it upon herself to find out what is going on with the young woman, who eventually reveals her name is Mae (Madeleine Arthur). With nowhere else to go, Suzanne brings Mae home to her family. Little did they know the truth behind Mae’s trauma.

There are so many problems with this series. I think the main problem is that the series isn’t long enough to develop the characters well enough. The writers want us to dislike or be wary of Mae. But, for the most part, she doesn’t do anything blatant to cause either of those emotions. Examples:

Suzanne has a daughter, Jules (Xaria Dotson), who is about the same age as Mae. Jules is jealous when Suzanne raids her closet for clothes for Mae. She gets upset when her friends like Mae, even though a judge forced Mae to enroll in high school when she has never had a formal education before. The one thing that could have maybe possibly been seen as an “evil deed” by Mae was that she included a picture of herself that Jules willingly took in an envelope of pictures to be used for a school newspaper column about her. In the picture, you could see a little bit of a giant wound that Mae has on her back, which somehow gets a bunch of kids at school to like her. Mae says that she included the picture because she thought it made Jules look good as a photographer. Are we really supposed to believe that Mae is manipulative enough to know how all of these kids would respond to one picture of her that barely shows her back? Especially since high school kids can be vicious. I don’t know that they would have responded with “you’re my hero!” They would have responded with “you’re a freak.”

Peter (Sam Jaeger), Suzanne’s husband, knows that Suzanne lived through a traumatic childhood. She literally has scars to show us. However, Peter gets upset when Suzanne does things to accommodate Mae. As a matter of fact, he is the one that insists that Suzanne find somewhere else for Mae to stay even though Mae has straight up stated that she feels safe with Suzanne. When Suzanne and Mae toured another foster home, Mae told Suzanne to her face that she didn’t feel safe there and that she wanted to stay with Suzanne. But, no, let’s send away the traumatized 15-year old because you think your wife isn’t prioritizing your family. (For the record, Suzanne is almost always there for the kids. In some parts, she is there MORE than Peter!)

Another problem is that the cult that is after Mae isn’t that scary. We see a few instances where they leave some marks to show they know where Mae is but they don’t follow up on most of those. The cult doesn’t actually do anything until the last three episodes. In those episodes, we get told of some other things the cult has done but we don’t see a whole lot.

In the finale, we finally get a reason to dislike Mae. However, I think her actions are a direct result of being told that she was getting sent away from Suzanne and her family. I don’t know that we can really blame her for those actions. Sorry, Peter, those are all your fault.

After all of this, I don’t know that the series is worth watching. It is based on a book so maybe the book goes more in depth on everything. But I really think that this should have been at least 10 episodes instead of 8. There are much better series about cults out there. Go watch one of those instead.

I was about 10 years old when Jim Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, has their televangelist empire fall apart. That’s not old enough to know or understand all of the gritty details but I vividly remember the couple on TV outside the courthouse and doing interviews. So I was very interested when I saw there would be a biographical drama that I could stream on HBO Max.

Tammy Faye LaValley meets Jim Bakker at North Central Bible College. The two get married and travel around the United States preaching. After a few years, they moved their preaching to a television network, where they became very popular. Popular enough that they created their own gospel network. However, in 1987, their empire collapsed due to allegations of fraud and rape.

This version of The Eyes of Tammy Faye is based on a 2000 documentary, also titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I haven’t watched the original documentary so I’m not sure how close this movie follows it. But this movie is very pro-Bakker. It paints Tammy Faye as a woman who was treated poorly as a child and, as a result, craves attention and admiration from other people. There is also this weird duality where she is portrayed as both the mastermind that got the couple all of the opportunities that led them to be as popular as they were and also a naive woman who was mistreated and ignored by her husband. I’m not sure that the real Tammy Faye was either of those. I think that both Jim and Tammy Faye manipulated their way into the hearts of Christians and that they were terrible to each other. They were both the same level of horribleness.

To be honest, I don’t think this movie was particularly worth watching. There were some interesting visuals but I feel like it misses out on how awful the Bakkers were to their followers. They conned people into donating more money than they were able to afford. While you can tell that the Bakkers are rich, we never really see whether the money was really theirs or if they were spending church money on their luxuries. It would have been better if we got to see more of the results of their “charitable begging.” Maybe, if you have never heard of Jim or Tammy Faye Bakker, this might be an OK introduction to who they are but you would probably do better with something closer to the truth.