Apple TV+ delivers a stylish and slow mystery

“This is over six years. Six seasons.”

That was M. Night Shyamalan, executive producer of Servant, speaking at New York Comic-Con about the path he envisions for Tony Basgallop’s Apple TV+ series. Six seasons, 60 episodes.

After watching the first 10 half-hour slices, I’ve gotta say: The greatest dread I feel is the idea that this mystery is going to take 50 more episodes to fully reveal itself.

It’s not that Servant is bad. The core cast of Lauren Ambrose, Toby Kebbell, Nell Tiger Free, and Rupert Grint (plus a growing assortment of side players) does their best. And in fairness to that cast, the central mystery can be quite riveting at times. But they’re all hamstrung by uneven plotting that relegates almost all of the season’s most revealing moments to the first and last episodes.

You might be wondering, what’s the story we’re dealing with here? Well, it’s complicated. The setup is one thing, but the course the season takes after Episode 1 quickly sets fire to that premise. Knowing where everything starts is helpful, though, so here goes.

We enter into the lives of Dorothy (Ambrose) and Sean (Kebbell) Turner a short while after they suffer one of the worst traumas imaginable. Just 13 weeks into their new lives as parents, their firstborn son Jericho died. 

The “how” and “why” remain a mystery, but what happened next for the Turners is plain for all to see. Dorothy’s grief was so acute that her friend and therapist recommended trying out transitional object therapy. In plainer terms, that means giving Dorothy a creepily bouncy and life-like baby doll to help ease her into the reality of what happened.

The therapy successfully dislodges Dorothy from what we’re told was a catatonic state, but it creates a new problem. Now, Dorothy thinks the baby doll is actually Jericho. Making matters worse, only a few people know what the Turners went through. So Dorothy is shuttered in at home on maternity leave from her job as a local news reporter, doing all the things that new mothers do in the care of their child. She pumps. She dotes. She works herself so hard that she feels the need to hire a live-in nanny.

Enter Leanne Grayson (Free), a wispy young woman with a quiet, patient demeanor and an apparent commitment to her faith. Leanne shows up and immediately buys into Dorothy’s delusion without question or concern. Even when she’s not in the room. To Leanne, the doll is a living, breathing baby Jericho.

Then things start to get really weird.

Then things start to get really weird.

It’s a discomforting premise that plays a lot better on screen than it sounds, mostly because it’s only a starting point. By the end of Episode 1, a different version of that reality asserts itself and it carries the story for the rest of the season.

Servant does have the feel of something that bears Shyamalan’s fingerprints. Unanswered questions are at the center of every episode, each of which treads along a singular theme reflected in the episode title. (The first three, in order, are “Reborn,” “Wood,” and “Eel.”) If there’s a big twist to come in one of Shyamalan’s trademark long cons, it’s not readily apparent. But the twists that do surface feel true to his brand.

Each half-hour chapter is also marked by the sort of formal elements that tend to pop up in Shyamalan’s work. Sean’s increasingly harried exchanges with Julian (Grint), Dorothy’s brother, favor tight, canted close-ups that speak to the secretive and at-times-conspiratorial nature of their discussions about Dorothy’s well-being. 

Most of the one-to-one exchanges in Servant feature tight shots, in fact. Each character’s limited understanding of the big picture is a key driver of the story’s central mystery. The conversational close-ups, then, are constant reminders that what we’re hearing represents just one perspective on what’s happening. No one has all the answers, but whoever’s speaking in the moment deserves our full attention. 

The cinematography, directed by Mike Gioulakis for nine of the 10 episodes, is generally more artful than it is utilitarian. Wide shots and slow, steady pans during dinnertime scenes and serious conversations inject some distance between the viewer and this shattered family, making it clear that we’re on the outside looking in. The camera also has a tendency to capture scenes at skewed angles, to accentuate the Turners’ grief-stricken-to-the-point-of-unhinged headspace.

And lest you think the Shyamalan connection to Servant‘s look and feel is coincidental, the executive producer, an admirer of legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, makes his own Hitchcockian cameo in the very first episode (one of two he directed himself). 

The problem is how little Servant has actually done with its wild premise and lush formal elements by the time the season ends. The central mystery couldn’t be more different, but the pacing is vintage Lost. Every episode piles on more questions, pausing only occasionally to hint at an answer or two.

The larger story that will presumably drive five more seasons starts to take shape by the end. But it takes nine entire episodes of largely unexplained WTF moments to get there. Servant successfully delivers on creepy atmosphere, but the pace is murder. It works best as a binge, and even then only for patient mystery-seekers. 

Unfortunately, Servant kicks off on Nov. 28 with three episodes at once and then flips over to a one-per-week format. The gaps between those final seven episodes is going to be torturous, and could well sink interest in the series. The only consolation is knowing that Apple’s already renewed it for at least one more season.

That’s stressful, too! Remember: six seasons. It’s an awful lot of commitment to expect from TV watchers in 2019 in the midst of so many other options. Recent examples like Watchmen and The Mandalorian make a strong case for the value of week-to-week episodic programming. Servant makes it clear that the binge still has value. 

I’m not going to sit here and say I didn’t enjoy parts of Servant‘s first season. There’s an intriguing mystery at the center of this story, and strong performances from the key players – I haven’t even talked about Grint and his growling American accent! – help to carry you past some questionable motivations and choices.

That said, it’s also a fact that a very long path forward has already been laid out, and there’s no certainty at this point that it will all come to fruition. The slow pace of Servant‘s blooming mystery will feel just right for a certain kind of viewer, especially with the artful execution. But you’ve got to ask yourself going in if you really want to invest in a question mark.