Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Servant’ On Apple TV+, M. Night Shyamalan’s Series About A Mysterious Nanny And A Baby Who Shouldn’t Be Alive

Twenty years ago (!), M. Night Shyamalan directed the ultimate spoiler alert film, The Sixth Sense. His career since has been checkered, to say the least; lined with successful films and amazing flops. His TV filmography is a bit more limited, with Wayward Pines being a cult hit that didn’t last very long on Fox. Now, with his second TV project, Servant, Shyamalan gets to use Apple‘s copious budget to creep audiences out. Does he succeed?

SERVANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A rainy residential street in Philadelphia. Creepy violin music plays. A woman pulls up to a townhouse in a cab; she’s wearing a hood.

The Gist: We see a long shot of a darkened, but well-appointed Philadelphia row house. A frantic new mom, Dorothy Turner (Lauren Ambrose) answers the door and effusively welcomes her new nanny Leanne (Nell Tiger Free). She’s very happy to find the quiet Midwestern transplant, and eagerly tells Leanne to make herself at home, and asks her pressing questions about her life. Her husband, Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell) is less enthused, calling Leanne “staff” and basically remaining detached.

And there’s a reason for that: The baby Leanne is being hired to take care of isn’t real, which we see when Sean takes the baby out of his crib by a foot and lets his head hit the side of the crib. The baby that Dorothy, a television news reporter, is calling “Jericho” is a “reborn doll”, designed to help Dorothy work out the shock of losing the Jericho at 13 weeks. “Just didn’t wake up one morning, poor little guy,” says Sean in a rather cold manner for someone who lost his only child. “Transitory object therapy, or so her unlicensed quack likes to call it,” he says to Leanne. It seems that Sean, a chef who develops menus for top restaurants, is approaching this as arrogantly as he does his job.

Leanne, though, is taking her job seriously, taking care of “Jericho” as if he’s a real baby. Sean, meanwhile, also found a homemade cross in Jericho’s room, which gives him splinters every time he touches it. This, of course, completely creeps Sean out, and it’s taking a toll on his increasingly tense relationship with Dorothy; she bathes to soothe her still-lactating breasts and tells him during one of those that “you just can’t stand someone else taking care of your child.” Sean he consults one of the few people who know about this situation, Dorothy’s younger brother Julian Pearce (Rupert Grint) for help. “This unfuckable nanny, she knows the situation?” Julian asks in a manner that makes Sean seem warm by comparison.

This is all while Leanne is out with the baby doing errands. After she comes back, Sean starts to hear a baby crying on the monitor. When he goes to Jericho’s room to figure out where it’s coming from, he gets the shock of his life.

Our Take: If I did what I usually do and watch just the first episode of Servant, I would have said to skip it, for a few reasons. Firstly, it felt like, even at 30-35 minutes, seeing a creep-fest where Ambrose acts wide-eyed crazy, Kebbell acts like a dick, Grint struggles with an American accent, Free is just plain weird, and the baby is fake was just going to be too much for me. M. Night Shyamalan, executive producer of the series which is created and written by Tony Basgallop (Berlin Station), directs the first episode, and his direction was so stylized it made things more annoying.

Shyamalan is trying to set an atmosphere in episode 1, which is why some of the initial shots are long and distant, then others are so up close that we don’t even see all of the person’s head or face. In one scene, we see Sean and Dorothy talk about Leanne in their opulent kitchen and the camera seems to be more focused on the empty space between them, with the two of them on the fringes of the frame. Shyamalan swings the camera from faces to objects to other faces without edits, to mimic how exasperatedly weirded out Sean is by this whole thing. The whole house is dark and cold, even in the daytime.

It felt like everything in the episode is so extreme, even Sean and Julian’s macabre humor, that 300 minutes of it (the season is 10 episodes, all around 30 minutes) would be exhausting. But the last scene of episode 1 changed everything. And here’s where I’m going to unleash a SPOILER ALERT because I can’t talk about the other two episodes premiering on November 28 without spoiling what happened at the end of episode 1.

After episode 1, the show’s premise becomes clear: Jericho is now a living, breathing baby and Leanne’s presence had something to do with that. But where did he come from? Who’s kid is it? While Sean and Julian get to the bottom of it, Dorothy and Leanne strengthen their bond, and the distance between Dorothy and Sean will continue to be an issue.

The visual template of the show also settles into place in episodes 2 and 3, which were directed by veteran TV director Daniel Sackheim. Much of the darkness and odd framing are still there, but Shyamalan’s camera tricks are largely eliminated, allowing the characters to take center stage. This is where Ambrose settles her crazy eyes down, where Sean’s dickishness comes with some context (and more splinters), and Free’s weirdness comes more into focus. Grint is especially helped by the more settled direction of episodes 2 and 3, bringing out a version of Julian that is an arrogant jerk, but one who cares for his sister and brother-in-law and just wants answers.

Sex and Skin: Aside from Leanne and Dorothy taking baths, and Dorothy rubbing her sore, lactating breasts that can’t expel milk, there isn’t much sex or skin.

Parting Shot: See what comes after SPOILER ALERT above to see what happens in the last scene.

Sleeper Star: Hard to call Rupert Grint a sleeper, but he does a surprisingly good job as the gruff Julian, despite having to tamp down his British accent for the role. He seems to have better control of it from episode 2 on.

Most Pilot-y Line: That baby doll was so fucking creepy. That’s all I have to say about that.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you get past the very quick first episode of Servant, you’ll be rewarded with the best show in Apple TV+’s brief history.

 

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Servant On Apple TV+