Dana Gould, creator of the IFC horror/comedy series Stan Against Evil, has confirmed that the series has been cancelled.
Gould dropped the announcement at the start of the most recent installment of his monthly podcast The Dana Gould Hour which was released Friday.
Stan Against Evil, I am sad to report, will not be returning for a fourth season. It had a great run of three seasons. It’s not coming back. Will it show up in some other form on some other network someday? Maybe. But right now, as we like to say, it’s dead as Kelsey’s nuts.
I’m very proud of the show and its fantastic cast – John McGinley, Janet Varney, Nate Mooney, Deborah Baker Jr., our great directors, Eban Schletter our great music person, Autonomous F/X, all the people that worked on the show. I’m leaving a lot of people out. This isn’t the official format for my thank you, but I thought everybody did a great job. The show’s on Hulu, you can enjoy it. It ain’t comin’ back anytime soon, but that is, as they say, showbiz, and I’m already working on some other cool crap that will hopefully come your way.
If you were a fan of 1980s horror films, or some of the horror anthology TV series from around that time, Stan Against Evil was the show you should have been watching. Set in an old New England town, the show centers on the titular Stan, a curmudgeonly small town sheriff who retires after the tragic death of his wife. Shortly after her funeral, Stan discovers that his wife was secretly a woman who battled against an seemingly never ending army of evil demons and creatures that attempt to invade the cursed New Hampshire hamlet. He reluctantly takes up his dead wife’s fight, joined by the town’s new Sheriff Evie, played by Janet Varney.
Gould has been very open as to how the series was inspired by such films as John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London. At a press event for the show at the 2017 New York Comic Con, he told us, “What [Landis] realized is that if you told the traditional horror movie, but just had people behave normally and not in a stylized way, you don’t need to write them funny because people are funny normally.” He also described Stan Against Evil as “a sitcom that somebody dropped into a horror film. They don’t know they’re in a sitcom and the horror movie doesn’t know that they’re a sitcom.”
Currently, the first two seasons of the show are available to watch on Hulu. The third season, which ended this past November, is available on Amazon Prime but should make its way to Hulu eventually.
