Apple TV+’s new show Servant centres on Dorothy and Sean, a wealthy couple with exhaustingly successful lives: she is a local newscaster with family money, he is a chef to the rich and famous. They dwell in a sumptuous if slightly gothic Manhattan townhouse with their new baby whom they have named, because we live in a morally derelict age with no sense of decorum or shame any more, Jericho.
OR DO THEY? For this is a supernatural thriller, created by Tony Basgallop and executive produced by M Night Shyamalan, so nothing can be straightforward. Or quick. Or unbeautifully framed. But we’ll get to that.
As was given away by the trailer (so if you don’t want to know, look away now), Jericho is an animatronic doll. The real Jericho died at 13 weeks, causing Dorothy to have a psychotic breakdown. The doll is part of the “transitional object therapy” prescribed by her shrink (or “unlicensed quack” according to Sean, who is not behind the project, possibly because it is clearly bonkers) and is treated as real – to the extent that Dorothy has insisted on hiring a nanny.
Bigger spoilers coming up, so remove yourself from the vicinity if so inclined.
Leanne Grayson, 18, from Chinny Reckon, Wisconsin, turns up on their doorstep with a suitcase, a Bible and a stamp across her forehead that says “Central Casting, Pallid Yet Indefinably Ominous Division”. She takes over Not Baby Jericho’s care without so much as a double-take. Perhaps she thinks all rich New Yorkers have dolls rather than babies. I, for one, wouldn’t put it past them. Or perhaps she is just shy. Or perhaps, as splinters start mysteriously appearing all over Sean’s body after he wrongs her, visiting children go into anaphylactic shock, dead bugs reanimate as she passes them and, oh, THE DOLL TURNS INTO A REAL LIVE BABY, there is something more, gosh, I don’t know, PURE FECKING DIABOLICAL going on.
I’m sorry. Servant has much to commend it. The performances are great – even Rupert Grint as Dorothy’s degenerate brother Julian makes a good case for himself. It looks gorgeous, every frame a painterly marvel, and it manages one or two moments of surprise every half-hour episode. There are stretches, too, during which it works really well as a study of adult anxiety in an unprecedentedly agitated age. But it is never – after an early moment when Sean snatches the doll we still think is a real baby out of his crib and bounces his head off the crib, which produces a gasp of shock – remotely scary. Creepy, yes. Atmospheric, always. Unsettling in general. But so little actually happens that the series drags. Tension rises to such small payoffs that you stop hoping for any kind of terrifying climax, and start wondering why you are watching something that might have made a decent 90-minute schlockfest being spread so agonisingly tastefully over five hours. A second series has already been commissioned, and Shyamalan has said that he will need six series – 30 hours – to tell the story properly. I foresee a nasty twist in that tale if he doesn’t ramp up the action a damn sight more next time round.
This is only Apple TV+’s fifth show and it may at least put to bed the belief that the new platform will specialise in spooning smooth, unchallenging pap into a mass audience less able to cope with a complex diet than either of the Jerichos. But if they were hoping, with Shyamalan’s name attached, to strike the seam of essential viewing, this is a swing and a miss.
