Which Lucifer Character Are You?

Learn More About Lucifer

Lucifer is one of the great survival stories of modern television. It premiered on Fox in January 2016, was cancelled after three seasons in 2018, was rescued by Netflix within weeks after an enormous fan campaign, and then ran three more seasons — ending in September 2021 with a finale that, unusually for a revived show, actually delivered on everything it had been building toward.

The premise sounds like a procedural gimmick. The Devil gets bored of Hell, moves to Los Angeles, opens a nightclub called Lux, and starts consulting for the LAPD because solving murders turns out to be interesting. Tom Ellis plays Lucifer Morningstar as a charming menace with a gift for extracting people’s deepest desires, which is convenient in interrogations and disastrous in his own life.

What elevated the show above its own logline was how seriously it took the theology as psychology. The Lucifer of this series is not evil — he is a son with a catastrophically unresolved relationship with his father, who happens to be God. Nearly every arc in six seasons is some version of that: blame, abandonment, whether a person can change, and whether anyone gets to decide they deserve forgiveness. The cases of the week are the frame. The family therapy is the show.

The supporting cast carried enormous weight. Lauren German’s Chloe Decker is the detective whose scepticism gives the whole premise friction, and the slow burn between them is the show’s spine. Lesley-Ann Brandt’s Mazikeen, a demon who follows Lucifer to Earth and then has to work out what she wants for herself, has one of the most satisfying character arcs in the series. D.B. Woodside’s Amenadiel moves from antagonist to the moral centre. Aimee Garcia’s Ella Lopez and Kevin Alejandro’s Dan Espinoza turned the precinct into a genuine ensemble rather than a set of desks.

The source material is worth knowing. The character originated in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and was spun off into a long-running Vertigo series written mostly by Mike Carey. The television version keeps the premise and almost nothing else — the comics are cosmic, austere and often bleak, where the show is a romantic comedy with occasional wings. Gaiman has been cheerfully clear about the distance between them.

Netflix’s revival also loosened the show’s format considerably. The later seasons include a black-and-white 1940s noir episode, a full musical episode, a body-swap arc and a time-travel season opener, all of which would have been difficult on a broadcast schedule. Season five’s introduction of Lucifer’s identical twin Michael let Ellis play both a version of the character who had grown and one who had not.

The show was never a critical darling in its Fox years, but it built something more durable: an audience that watched it because they had become attached to the people in it. When Netflix released the final season, it went straight to the top of the platform’s global charts — a decent argument that the fan campaign had been right all along.

If you like your supernatural drama with a side of family issues, try Which Supernatural Character Are You?, or for another charismatic morally grey lead there is Which Dexter Character Are You?