Ash vs Evil Dead

Ash vs Evil Dead is an American comedy horror television series developed by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, and Tom Spezialy for Starz. The series is set in the Evil Dead universe created by Raimi, with Bruce Campbell reprising his role as Ash Williams from the film series. Ray Santiago, Dana DeLorenzo, and Lucy Lawless also star.

The series premiered on October 31, 2015. Three days before the series's premiere, Starz renewed it for a second season, which premiered on October 2, 2016. Starz renewed it for a third season, which premiered on February 25, 2018. The series was canceled after three seasons on April 29, 2018; however, in July 2022, Campbell confirmed that an animated revival was in active development.

The series is set approximately 30 years after the first three Evil Dead films and serves as a sequel to that trilogy. Ash Williams works at the "Value Stop" as a simple stock boy. Also working at the store is his friend Pablo and the object of Pablo's affections, Kelly. Ash has seemingly done very little with his life since returning from 1300 AD at the end of Army of Darkness, and the beginning of the series sees him living in a trailer and drinking alone in bars. However, Ash must soon renounce his routine existence and become a hero once more by taking up arms and facing the titular Evil Dead. Pablo and Kelly decide to join him on his quest to save humanity.

The series first started life as two competing ideas for a fourth Evil Dead film. However at the time the Raimi brothers did not know how to get funding for the film and so it was instead written as a TV show. Writing for the medium presented new challenges for Sam as he had to make the series accessible to new viewers as well as create new characters to "bounce off of". The project was first officially revealed by Raimi at a surprise appearance at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con. That November, Starz announced that they officially put an order in for the series. Campbell said the channel was the only network that would give them the ability to be unrated and unrestricted; Campbell has stated that Starz does not require the crew to create alternate, "wimpy" versions for television.

The pilot episode of the series was written by Sam Raimi (who also directed), Ivan Raimi and Tom Spezialy. In February 2015, original film series producer Robert Tapert returned to produce along with Raimi, Campbell and Craig DiGregorio. Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo were cast in the lead roles of Pablo Simon Bolivar and Kelly Maxwell, and Jill Marie Jones was cast as Amanda Fisher, a Michigan State Trooper. In March 2015, Lucy Lawless was cast as Ruby, a mysterious figure who's on a quest to stop the evil outbreak and believes that Ash is the one who's the cause of it. In April 2015, Starz released a new graphic teaser advertising the TV show is coming in the fall of 2015, along with a new poster for the series. Filming commenced in Auckland, New Zealand later that month.

Due to legal issues with Universal Pictures, the events from Army of Darkness could not specifically be mentioned in the first season. In April 2015, the producers made it clear that they wanted to resolve the issue, and in mid-2016, producer Robert Tapert stated that the rights issue had been solved and that references to Army of Darkness would appear from season two onward.

In June 2016, a Facebook user posted a photo of a bruised, bloodied, and scratched Samara Weaving (without identifying that the woman in the image was Weaving or any actress). The photo was accompanied by the caption "The result of Fascism in America...simply because she was a Trump supporter." Although some news outlets clarified that the photo was of Samara Weaving and that she was not really injured, many supporters of then-candidate Donald Trump were convinced that the image was proof of liberal violence against Trump supporters. In support of this misinterpretation of the photo, the post was shared close to 30,000 times. To try to counter this misinformation, Ash vs Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell tweeted, "Check your facts, folks. This is an actress named Samara Weaving from #AshVsEvilDead. This is a make-up test. Sad." Weaving herself tweeted, "I really hate this."

It was announced on April 20, 2018, that Ash vs Evil Dead had been canceled after a three-season run, with the last episode airing on April 29, 2018. Towards the end of the third season, ratings had declined from the initial 437,000 same-day viewers of the first season to around 175,000 non-DVR viewers. According to Variety, at the time of the eighth episode of the third season's airing, the show averaged a 0.08 rating in adults aged 18 to 49, with approximately 177,000 viewers per episode.