All About Eve: Twenty-First Century Television Goes Back to the Beginning

In this chapter, Holly Morse explores Eve’s cultural afterlives in television, focusing particularly on her role in the hit television show Lucifer. Throughout several seasons, Lucifer offers an extensive retelling of the Bible’s first woman in the twenty-first century; the show simultaneously both reaffirms and yet also pushes at the boundaries of the stereotypes that abound in the history of interpretation of Genesis 2–3, ultimately creating space for Eve to walk out of the garden and into a new life of female independence and queer love. Morse argues that Lucifer can help audiences notice not only some of the more problematic elements of Eve’s biblical narrative but also to see its complexities. Eve is a woman who is derived from her partner and destined to be his helper (Gen. 2:18–24), but she is also an individual who is active, decisive, curious, and cuts her own path (Gen. 3:6). In the garden story, she is punished for this independence (Gen. 3:16), but in Lucifer, she ultimately flourishes. This contemporary interpretation of Eve therefore demonstrates that popular television can provide its viewers with challenging, at times irreverent, but also deeply engaging ways to connect with biblical literature.