A security consultant hunts for a ruthless assassin. Equally obsessed with each other, they go head to head in an epic game of cat-and-mouse.
Latest episode: S4 E8 Hello, Losers (Apr 10, 2022)
Eve is a bored, whip-smart, pay-grade MI5 security officer whose desk-bound job doesn't fulfill her fantasies of being a spy. Villanelle is a mercurial, talented killer who clings to the luxuries her violent job affords her. Everything changes when they cross paths.
Villanelle has disappeared, and Eve is left reeling, having no idea if the woman she stabbed is alive or dead. With both of them in deep trouble, Eve has to find Villanelle before someone else does. But unfortunately, she's not the only person looking for her.
After the emotional climax of Season Three, Eve, Villanelle and Carolyn are in very different places. Following Eve and Villanelle’s exchange on the bridge, Eve is on a revenge mission, while Villanelle has found a brand-new community in an attempt to prove she’s not a “monster.” Having killed Paul, Carolyn goes to extraordinary lengths to continue to chase down The Twelve and the person that ordered Kenny’s hit. This season follows our extraordinary women, each driven by passion, revenge and obsession, building towards a messy, nuanced and totally glorious series finale.
What I keep coming back to with Killing Eve isn’t the murders, though they’re often staged with a nasty little flourish, but the way the show treats attention as a form of possession. latestnetflix.com's take is that Eve Polastri doesn’t just chase Villanelle; she studies her, imagines her, gets haunted by her, and then — with the kind of reckless curiosity that feels more human than wise — starts to enjoy the chase.
That’s the sly central joke of the series, and also its real subject. The thriller machinery is there, sure, but it’s mostly a delivery system for a very old story about obsession, self-invention, and the way two people can become each other’s most embarrassing secret.
Season 1 arrived in 2018 as a glossy BBC America import, and it entered a TV landscape already crowded with antiheroes and prestige cat-and-mouse games. What made it feel fresh wasn’t that it was dark — plenty of shows had already made a habit of being dark in public — but that it was flirtatious about darkness. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who developed the series from Luke Jennings’s novels, gives the whole thing a wicked, almost childish sense of play.
Even when someone’s bleeding out, the show keeps a little spring in its step. That can be exhilarating. It can also be slippery.
I’m not always convinced the later seasons know how to live up to the first one’s balance of wit and menace, but the series at its best understands that attraction is often just danger with better lighting.
The conversation around Killing Eve has always circled Jodie Comer, and deservedly so, but Sandra Oh is the show’s grounding force. Oh had already spent years building a career out of intelligence that never feels merely academic; she plays Eve as a woman whose competence has become a kind of trap. Watch her shoulders.
They’re always a little raised, as if she’s bracing for impact even in ordinary conversations. Eve’s fascination isn’t written in speeches. It’s there in the tiny delay before she answers, in the way she leans forward as if the room itself has become interesting only because Villanelle might be in it.
Oh makes curiosity look physically risky.
Comer, meanwhile, arrives with a different kind of intelligence: almost feline, but not in the obvious way people say that when they mean “mysterious.” She’s funny. That’s the thing. Villanelle’s menace lands because Comer lets her be vain, bored, childish, vain again, and then suddenly dead-eyed.
She can pivot from a shopaholic’s delight in clothes to a coldly professional act of cruelty without seeming to change characters, which is the point: Villanelle isn’t a split personality, she’s a performer. Comer had already shown in other work that she can move between registers with frightening ease, but here she gets to weaponize charm as both disguise and dare. You can see why the role made her famous.
Few shows have matched the electric tension of Killing Eve, the 2018 spy thriller that turned Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer into household names—and each other’s most compelling on-screen obsession. Behind the scenes, their dynamic was just as charged, latestnetflix.com maintains, though the real drama extended far beyond the cat-and-mouse games of MI5 agent Eve Polastri and assassin Villanelle.
From the jump, Oh and Comer’s chemistry was undeniable. In interviews, both actresses gushed about their working relationship, framing it as a mix of professional respect and genuine affection. Oh once described their bond as "instant," while Comer called filming with her co-star "a joy" . Their playful banter in behind-the-scenes clips—like Oh playfully shoving Comer or the two dissolving into laughter mid-scene—suggested a camaraderie that translated seamlessly to the screen .
But the admiration wasn’t just personal. Oh, a veteran of Grey’s Anatomy, reportedly saw Comer as a revelation, praising her ability to pivot between Villanelle’s childlike charm and chilling sociopathy. Comer, in turn, admitted she "had fun" playing a character who was, by her own admission, "a sociopathic assassin" . The mutual respect kept the show’s central dynamic fresh, even as the plot spiraled into darker territory.
As Killing Eve approached its 2022 finale, Oh was vocal about the emotional toll of wrapping the series. She revealed she "thought a lot" about the ending, hinting at the weight of saying goodbye to a role that had redefined her career . In a Vanity Fair career retrospective, Oh reflected on how Killing Eve broke stereotypes for Asian women in Hollywood, calling it a "gift" to play a character who was "flawed, messy, and deeply human" .
But the finale wasn’t just a personal milestone—it was a creative gamble. The show’s final season polarized fans, with some praising its bold, ambiguous conclusion and others criticizing its tonal shifts. Oh’s comments about Season 2 being "bad in a bad way" (a phrase she later clarified was about the characters’ moral decay, not the writing) added fuel to the fire . Whether the ending landed or not, it was clear Oh had invested deeply in Eve’s journey.
Despite the show’s cultural impact, some behind-the-scenes details remain murky. The series was adapted from Luke Jennings’ Codename Villanelle novels, with Killing Eve: No Tomorrow (2018) serving as the second book in the series 
. But how closely the show followed the source material—or whether the writers deviated for shock value—is unclear from the available evidence.
There’s also the question of creative friction. While no major conflicts were confirmed, the show underwent multiple showrunner changes, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Season 1) handing off to Emerald Fennell (Season 2) and later writers. Whether these shifts contributed to the tonal whiplash in later seasons is a matter of speculation—though Oh’s cryptic "bad in a bad way" comment about Season 2 might hint at behind-the-scenes tension .
One thing is certain: Killing Eve thrived on its unpredictability, both on and off screen. The show’s blend of dark humor, stylish violence, and psychological depth kept audiences hooked, even as its later seasons struggled to maintain the magic of its early days. With a 7.3/10 rating on SensCritique (based on over 6,600 votes), it’s clear the series left a mark—even if its legacy is as complicated as its characters .
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