Apple TV+'s Servant is extra, extra disturbing: It's undeniably addictive, yet difficult to watch

The Washington Post

"How psycho do you like your psychological thrillers? It’s a personal call, sort of like spicy food — will I squeal with satisfaction now but regret this decision later, while I’m trying to sleep peacefully?" says Hank Stuever. "Think of this review, then, as a caution on the menu: Servant, a new psychological thriller series that begins streaming Thursday on Apple TV Plus, is extra, extra disturbing. Bearing the imprimatur of M. Night Shyamalan, the film director known for his twist endings and uneven output, Servant is difficult to watch and fully process, and it’s nobody’s idea of a holiday treat. Yet it is also undeniably addictive. It’s next to impossible to quit in the middle of it, as the viewer becomes desperate to know how it will turn out. But let me put it another way: How are you with dead babies? I thought so. Servant, created and written by Tony Basgallop, does what all good psychological thrillers must do: It exploits one of our worst fears and, through the uses of metaphor and familiar horror tropes, drags us kicking and screaming through a story that may or may not be cathartic. I would say that anyone who has lost a baby — or worries about losing a baby, or suffers from postpartum depression, or simply has the new-parent heebie-jeebies about everything and anything baby — might want to take a pass on this one."

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• Servant is one of the most uncomfortable things you'll watch this year: "If there’s one thing I need to get across to you about Servant it’s that it’s uncomfortable. In every way possible," says Jill Pantozzi. "From viewing incredibly private moments in the Turners’ Philadelphia brownstone to scenes filled with heavy silence and cameras too close to their subjects, (creator Tony Basgallop) keeps viewers feeling unsettled at every turn."
• Servant is hard to love with plenty of atmosphere but no momentum: "Like a less-campy version of American Horror Story, Servant strives to keep viewers invested by slowly portioning off bits of its mystery and ending each episode with some particularly potent new twist or piece of information," says Samantha Nelson. "It’s visually compelling and well acted enough to be serviceable entertainment, but like the creepy doll at the heart of the story, it has a lifelessness that makes it hard to love."
• Servant is creepy, deranged fun: "Servant is far from perfect," says Liam Mathews. "It requires a ton of suspension of disbelief, does way too much mystery-wise, and may be insensitive to mothers who have lost children. But it's creepy, compulsively watchable fun, with a distinct personality. It shows that Apple is willing to make shows that are pretty dark, pretty risky, and not particularly aspirational. It's a beautiful house, but the people who live there are lunatics who hate each other. That's the kind of setup you always want from a psychological thriller, no matter who's making it."
• M. Night Shyamalan's association with Servant hurts more than it helps: “Servant feels so much like a Shyamalan story that those unwanted expectations only compound the problem, as the half-hour entries repeatedly build to less than the sum of their parts," says Ben Travers. "Throughout the 10-episode first season, it often feels like some big twist is waiting at the end of this episode, or the next, or the next one after that, until you’re finished and the payoff doesn’t quite live up to the hype. That’s not to say there aren’t secrets or surprises, moments of charged excitement and heart-shaking pain, as well as strong acting and some of Shyamalan’s more accomplished constructions."
• Servant has too much up its sleeve: "Servant can be a frustrating watch, with its oddball ensemble manifesting as eerily, purposefully translucent, but it’s a compulsive one," says Randall Colburn. "The 30-minute episodes help—every minute feels purposeful, symbolic, or some combination of the two—and there’s a hysterical quality, both in its performances and plotting, that gives its austere, shadowy aesthetic a surprising spark." Colburn adds: "It’s tough to latch onto these ideas, though, when the story continues to pivot, tease, and withhold. Mystery is good, but Servant operates between so many blurred lines that, on an episode-to-episode basis, one longs for more solid ground—or, perhaps, a Shyamalan-like twist to lock everything into place."
• Horror is better suited for the big screen, as Servant proves: "The horror genre all but demands that people behave in ways that seem illogical or self-destructive just to keep the story going," says Alan Sepinwall. "That can work just fine in the confined setting of a film, especially as the plot keeps churning and there isn’t much opportunity to start questioning what an idiot someone is being. But so little happens in Servant past the first episode that it becomes hard to not dwell on Sean’s inability to call in the police, a medical professional, and/or Doctor Strange to figure out what’s up."
• Servant is essentially a Black Mirror installment stretched into ten half-hour parts: "It is American Horror Story, minus that franchise’s capacity to wink at itself and its own reliance on tropes," says Jen Chaney. "And yet as silly as the show gets, I still wanted to get to the bottom of what’s going on with Sean and Dorothy Turner (Toby Kebbell and Lauren Ambrose), their new live-in nanny, Leanne (Nell Tiger Free, Myrcella Baratheon from Game of Thrones), and the Turners’ infant son, Jericho, for whom Leanne is supposed to provide care. Silly but watchable could be Apple TV+’s brand. Hey, it’s not the worst brand."
• Disney+ shows that Prestige TV doesn't have to be bloated with 30-minute Servant episodes: "There’s an unspoken rule in television. If you want to be taken seriously, go for hourlong episodes," says Kayla Cobb. "But Apple TV+’s Servant looks that rule in its dead eyes and continues to do whatever it wants. Not only is M. Night Shyamalan’s latest series a chilling tale of corrupted motherhood, but it’s also one that manages to get the most shock for its buck, one 30-minute installment at a time. As a result the excellent Servant shows just how bloated most 'serious' examples of prestige TV have become."
• Servant is Apple TV+'s first must-watch show: "What we've seen so far lives up to Apple TV+'s hype in ways that star vehicles like See and The Morning Show didn't quite achieve," says David Opie. "Who would have thought that a plastic baby could outshine Jennifer Aniston and Jason Momoa so spectacularly? And just when we thought Shyamalan might have finally ran out of twists..."
• Servant contributes a mood of luxurious dread, but it feels far-fetched that he can stretch this out to six seasons
• The problem is how little Servant has actually done with its wild premise and lush formal elements by the time the season ends
• How Servant composer Trevor Gureckis made a creepy show even creepier
• M. Night Shyamalan says Servant was always intended to be a TV series: "In the beginning, it was more of an arbitrary aspirational thing to say, hey, I want to do this in 60 parts," he tells Uproxx. "We’ll do it in half hours. And when I thought about the half-hour format as a thriller, it really went click for me: Hm, the things that I love to do in cinema, I could do in a half-hour format. But an hour format, there’s so much content that you start to vamp. You can’t help it. That’s what I have an issue with most of the time in this longer form format. With 30 minutes, you get that kind of high octane storytelling and you’re out. You know, that strong thriller line in each episode and you’re out. So, for example, if we were lucky enough to do all 60 pieces of this? Well, you saw ten already, that’s 30 hours of content, right? 30 hours of content! That’s about a season and a half of old network television."
• What was Shyamalan's intent with the direct-to-camera POV?: "Well, I tend to think of two things," he says. "One, when I'm thinking about cinema, what is the tone of the overall piece? So, you think about it as an overall piece and what is that vocabulary. Then within that vocabulary, what is your character feeling at that moment? And how can I help you accentuate that you're going to break up with your boyfriend or you think he's going to murder you? How do I accentuate that feeling? I don't know your boyfriend."
• Shyamalan on the baby doll's design process: "How about this: no design process! That is the doll they use for this kind of therapy. It's very real. It's an exact duplicate of a (specific) baby. The weight, the movement, all of it is exactly real. It feels like a baby of that weight, of that size. When you hold the baby, you immediately have a reaction. If we brought that baby in here right now and you started holding it, you would have a reaction. You could feel it on set. Everyone starts bobbing it a little bit as they're holding the baby. Even when we were shooting for the ad campaign, we would shoot the doll, but it didn't look like a doll. We had to make it look even more like a doll so you could tell what it was if you were driving by it. It presents some really interesting problems, because it lives in the uncanny valley."