The Callous Horror of <em>Servant</em>

There’s so much to mine here. Servant could be a series about the otherworldliness of grief, and the ways in which it seems to fragment and distort reality. A more thoughtful show might be a meditation on the peculiar anxiety and fraught social dynamics of trusting your children to the care of total strangers, like Leïla Slimani’s searing 2016 novel, The Perfect Nanny. Because Servant is shot almost entirely within Dorothy and Sean’s rowhouse, I wondered whether the home itself might be a malign presence, a Shirley Jackson character all on its own.

Servant, though, doesn’t seem to have the emotional curiosity to earn its premise. As with any work with Shyamalan’s name attached, there are twists along the way and unpleasant guests who arrive out of the blue, all of which refocuses the show away from parental grief and onto what amounts to a much more generic, potboiled mystery. From the beginning, there’s a fascinating contrast between Dorothy and Leanne, the scarily extroverted TV reporter and the painfully reticent teenager. If Dorothy and Sean are 21st-century avatars of yuppie privilege, Leanne feels ripped from a Gothic novel, from her porcelain features to her Victorian wardrobe. (It’s also inevitably suspicious when a contemporary teenager doesn’t have a phone or an email account, let alone an attachment to Instagram.)

When the show isn’t emphasizing, via squeaky violin tremolos and dead eels, that there’s Really Something Wrong With the Nanny, it’s painting Dorothy as a more mundane kind of monster. Dorothy repeatedly tells Sean that Leanne and her $900-a-month salary are a total steal; she later drags Leanne shopping and gives her an advance from her next paycheck to buy shoes (only to then ask to borrow them). And this is the truly uncomfortable part of Servant: It urges you, over and over, to loathe and condemn a woman whose baby has died. Look at the spectacle of this woman’s delusion, the series seems to say, lingering on the frozen plasticity of Jericho’s features. Note her narcissism, her vanity, the ridiculousness of her newscasts. All six of the show’s executive producers are men and all 10 episodes are written by Basgallop, which perhaps makes it unsurprising that Servant, far from sketching out the contours of maternal grief, instead treats Dorothy with such casual disdain.

As Servant unravels the mystery of what happened to Dorothy and Sean—and to their child—it’s propulsive in a caustic kind of way. Sean is the mournful yin to Dorothy’s manic yang, a stay-at-home chef whom Kebbell (who starred as a different kind of haunted husband in the Black Mirror episode “The Entire History of You”) loads with quiet intelligence and creative energy. Dorothy’s grief is portrayed as bizarre in its depth, with its dolls and nannies and inconvenient catatonia. In the first episode, Shyamalan as director emphasizes the oddness of Dorothy’s enthusiasm, filling the screen with Ambrose’s manic grin. Sean, by contrast, is a model of stoic sufferance and emotional texture, waiting until he’s alone at night to quietly weep. If Dorothy’s job is ridiculous, Sean’s ingenuity as a chef—and the alchemy with which he turns slabs of dead meat and fish into works of art—is the most interesting part of the series.