Willard's Mill. A sleepy town in the backwoods of New Hampshire. For 20 years, grumpy sheriff Stanley "Stan" Miller (John C. McGinley) has kept the citizens in relative line. Until the passing of his wife that is. After a bizarre vision and violent outburst at her funeral, Stan is forced to resign.
Enter new Sheriff Evie Barret. Who soon discovers Stan's wife was the only reason he survived his job. The role of sheriff of Willard's Mill is cursed. And now Stan, Evie, nitwit deputy Leon and oddball daughter Denise find themselves fighting off a cadre of demons and monsters.
And Stan just wants to enjoy retirement...
Cancelled after 3 seasons.
Stan Against Evil includes examples of"
- Actor Allusion:
- The demon of "Girl's Night" questions why Stan didn't become a doctor instead of a cop after he found a man having a heart attack as a kid.
- In "Intensive Scare Unit" Stan hallucinates a conversation with a Dr. Cox — when trouble arises, he tells Cox to find whoever's responsible and call him a girl's name.
- Affably Evil:
- The werepony from "Curse of the Werepony" is a friendly, folksy guy who genuinely likes Evie, and decides to murder her ex-husband Kenny to help her out.
- The imp in "Girl’s Night", who is a bombastic showman who is friendly with Stan all the while trying to murder him.
- Burn the Witch!: The curse originated two hundred years ago after the then-sheriff of Willard's Grove burned 172 people at the stake for witchcraft.
- Chekhov's Gun: In "Know, Know, Know Your Goat" Evie notices some oversized wooden salad servers on the wall in Stan's kitchen. They turn out to be the exact weapon needed to defeat the Monster of the Week.Evie: Hey, uh, what are those?Denise: The salad thingies? Those are Mom's. She never let us take 'em down.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Denise exists in her own, odd little world.
- Clueless Deputy: Leon is not good at his job. The only thing keeping him employed was Stan's apathy, and no other candidates to fill the position. Stan, for what it's worth, early-on claims that Leon's father owns the sheriff's office, so that if they fired him they'd have to move.
- Cool Old Guy: Stan may be a grumpy tool, but he's still a competent ass-kicker when he gets up.
- Everyone Has Standards: Stan is a heavy drinker and delights in what is often considered an unhealthy diet, but he does not smoke; he uses profanity but usually not a common one beginning with the letter 'f', and every sort of personal insult but never a common such implying a developmental disorder. (The last may be due to actor John C. McGinley's activism in that area.)
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: What Stan and Evie find themselves stuck in during the season 1 finale, "Level Boss".
- Grumpy Old Man: Stan is curmudgeonness personified. Practically every line is a complaint about having to leave his chair.
- Kick Them While They Are Down: What inspired Stan to become a cop? When he kicked the shit out of a guy having a heart attack.
- Manchild: Or rather womanchild. Stan’s daughter, Denise, is rather naïve and immature for her age, behaving more like a seven-year-old than a young adult.
- Needle in a Stack of Needles: Eccles' grave is in the cemetery amongst the 172 women he'd burned as witches, using a pseudonym (but not recorded in the ledger).
- Punch-Clock Villain: Strictly speaking most of the demons have no personal grudge against Stan and Evie. They go after them just to appease Eccles. In at least one case a demon seems to believe he can use their deaths to buy back his human life, and then take up the fight against Eccles himself.
- Robbing the Dead: Happens quite often, usually to recover a magical artifact. Stan digs up his own wife in the first episode for that reason.
- Schizo Tech: People have smartphones, FitBits and the Internet — but home phones are all Bakelites, Stan watches an old cathode ray TV, and all of the beer seen in the show is in old pull-tab cans.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The crux of season 2 is Stan trying to travel back a year, and save his wife before she dies.
- Our Werebeasts Are Different: "The Curse of the Werepony". The title should clue you in.
- Testosterone Poisoning: Stan derides anything remotely unmanly.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Stan doesn't really care about the demons, and his wife's secret job of killing them. He just wants to lounge about and enjoy his retirement.
- The Woman Behind the Man: Stan would have met the fate of every other Willard's Mill sheriff if not for his wife fighting the demons out to get him.
