What is like to bring life into the world? What is like to so quickly lose it? I didn't know what to expect from Apple TV Plus's new dark drama, "Servant."
The show appears to be about an upper-class Philadelphian couple, a moody chef and an ambitious TV reporter, who've recently lost a newborn child.
In her grief, the wife suffers a breakdown so the husband and his smarmy brother-in-law (played by Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter movies) allow her to fixate on a doll replacement to ease her grief. This works so well that the wife actually orders a live-in nanny from online to care for the "infant" while she continues her work reporting the news.
The new nanny is a quite mysterious girl with a Christian-esque religiosity who effortlessly plays along with the wife's delusion of the doll being a real child, to the chagrin of the husband.
Is that all there is to the show--grief, upper-class East Coast American angst? Nope.
Despite the strangeness of a couple and a nanny pretending that a doll is a real child, things get even weirder at the end of the episode when the husband hears a cry from upstairs. He goes up to investigate it, doubting what he heard, and upon entering the nursery finds not a doll in the crib but a living breathing baby boy.
Apple TV's Servant is produced by M Night Shyamalan so I expected some type of twisty dark drama, which is exactly what I got -- but there's something subtle and understated about "Servant." It's not an action-packed, edge of your seat, kind of show. This thing's definitely a slow burner but there's something both calm but haunting about this story.
After just one episode, I'm definitely intrigued. I assume the nanny stole a baby and swapped it with the therapy doll that'd been provided by the husband and brother-in-law but this is M Night Shyamalan so things may be a bit more twisted than that.
The way the show captures East-Coast American elite feels spot on. It's a bit of a stereotype but there's a grain of truth in there -- pompous, self-absorbed, bitterly and toxically ensnared in their own luxury and privilege. You immediately view them with a judgmental eye but then there is the universal scenario of loss that slightly humanizes them.
You, or I at least, can't wait to see how they will react to what the story brings.
How will they handle tragedy, joy, the mundane, or miracles?
These episodes are a short thirty minutes with no fat, just constant story happening one after the other.
I definitely recommend this show and can't wait to watch more.
