Apple TV+ ‘Servant’ Season 2 review: More suspense, more impact

Are you familiar with the “bomb theory?”

It’s an idea coined by Alfred Hitchcock: Imagine there’s a bomb under a table, and the two people sitting down don’t know it’s there. That bomb could just explode suddenly, and it would be momentarily, powerfully surprising for us in the audience. But what if we know about the bomb the whole time and we’re watching these people sit there, unaware they’re about to die? That, my friends, is suspense.

That’s what Servant has in abundance in its second season. This is great news for the Apple TV+ series created by Tony Basgallop and executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, whose past work has established him as a student of Hitchcock. 

Servant had a bit of a rough start in 2019. Season 1 dripped with artful cinematography and an engrossing, if totally weird, mystery. But it wasn’t until close to the end of the 10-episode run that we really started to get a glimpse of the proverbial bomb under the table. Servant also launched alongside Apple’s then-brand-new streaming service, with a big and implausible vision for a six-season arc. 

Simply, it was a hard story to trust: So many other good shows have faced painful and unexpected cancellations in recent years. But it now looks like Servant is here to stay. There’s already a greenlit third season and Shyamalan himself confirmed in 2020 that, actually, four seasons will be enough to tell the full story.

That’s welcome news as we head into a second season on Jan. 15 that immediately feels stronger and more sure of itself than what came before. Yeah, Servant is still “that weird Apple TV+ show about a dead baby, his grieving family, and a lifelike baby doll that somehow transforms into a new flesh-and-blood baby.” But now we know the key players and have a better sense of the forces arrayed against them (or so we think). The bananas premise is still front and center, but there’s enough mystery revealed to imbue the suspenseful bits with meaning.

Suspense is something Servant has in abundance in its second season.

The new season picks up right where Season 1 left off, with little baby Jericho (the live one) missing and seemingly replaced with the creepy doll that Dorothy Turner (Lauren Ambrose) once used to process the grief of losing her newborn child. Also on the missing persons list is Leanne Grayson (Nell Tiger Free), the creepy live-in nanny with a mysterious background that connects to a religious death cult.

It was only after Leanne arrived in Season 1 that Dorothy’s doll-baby transformed into real-baby Jericho. With both of them gone, there’s every reason for Dorothy to believe that Leanne’s disappearance and Jericho’s disappearance are intertwined. Which of course we in the audience know to be the case, even if the “how” and “why” are more of a mystery.

Meanwhile, Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell) is taking the whole thing in stride. He never really seemed sold on parenting a child that definitely (probably?) wasn’t his dead kid reborn. But he’s also still dealing with the same odd affliction from the first season that robbed him entirely of his ability to taste or feel pain. Sean’s been on his own journey for as long as we’ve known him and, just like him, we continue to wonder what the hell is going on there.

It’s important to remember, too: This is a deeply traumatized couple. Their actual infant died because of Dorothy’s exhaustion-fueled screw-up. They were still in the midst of their grieving process when Leanne arrived and the doll, which was only there in the first place to move along the grieving process, transformed into a live baby. That’s gonna mess with anyone’s head.

And so when the show asks us to take a number of big leaps — which it does more than once through the opening seven episodes of Season 2 that I’ve watched — we accept it. Dorothy and Sean are traveling along different yet parallel paths and they’re both out of their minds. Dorothy’s brother Julian (Rupert Grint) isn’t much help, either. He’s a self-absorbed and fully functional alcoholic who seems more worried about jail and consequence than his own sister’s well-being.

If this all sounds exceedingly dark, that’s because it is. But Servant also brings along another of the first season’s many odd features: A sense of humor. It’s dark comedy to be sure, but is nonetheless effective at cutting through both the tension and the grim circumstances. 

When the Turners hatch an outlandish plan to run pizza deliveries out of their home — all part of their efforts to locate Jericho and Leanne — you’d be forgiven for arching an eyebrow. Then they land on a name for this fake restaurant that’s meant to ensnare alleged members of Leanne’s cult: Cheesus Crust. The outlandishness is the whole point.

It’s a current that runs throughout the season. From the still-developing puppy love story between Leanne and Tobe (Tony Revelori) to the mystery that can only be unlocked by a Betamax player, Servant expects you to laugh, if uneasily, on a regular basis. Grint is a particularly noteworthy piece here, too; if there’s anything that passes for comic relief on this odd but very watchable TV show, it’s him.

Servant also sticks with the approach of never swinging too big or doing too much with each half-hour slice of story. During Season 1, that slow progression sometimes felt like it was just filling up minutes. We hung around the Turner household and furrowed our brows at the growing sense that something strange was afoot. Back then, though, we weren’t really in on the mystery. 

That isn’t the case in Season 2. It may not be the full picture, but we have a much clearer understanding now of what’s happening at the fringes of this story. All of a sudden, the show’s constrained setting — it’s mostly the Turners’ multi-story urban townhouse — and reliance on episode-capping cliffhanger moments works in its favor. 

For all the moments of dark humor and all the newly surfacing questions that keep piling up, it’s the suspenseful twists and turns that propel Season 2 of Servant most effectively. It only works because we know what’s under the table now. That bomb is tick-tick-ticking away, and we’re getting more and more nervous about what will happen when it eventually explodes. 

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