Are You Being Served
The nanny brings more hoodoo into the lives of the quirky Turners in Servant
DESPITE HIS THREE DECADES OF writing and directing films, M Night Shyamalan is still just dipping his creative toes into the television pond. His first series Wayward Pines (2015-2016) lasted two seasons, but felt like a project where Night was trying to work out his comfort zone in the medium. However with Servant, his Apple TV+ horror series, Shyamalan and his collaborators seem to have hit their stride telling the extremely unsettling and off-kilter tale of a couple spiralling in the aftermath of the loss of their infant son, Jericho.
The first season slowly peels back the tragic details of how Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) and Sean (Toby Kebbell) Turner lost their son. But sadness is equally balanced with chills, as Sean and their inner circle allow Dorothy to bond with an ultra-realistic reborn doll so that she doesn’t suffer a psychotic break. Sean even hires a naïve nanny, Leanne (Nell Tiger Free), to help keep up the ruse. But the nanny brings even weirder oddities into the Turner home, including her cult association, Biblical sufferings and the doll seemingly coming to life.
Picking up right where the first season finale cliffhanger left audiences, Shyamalan tells Red Alert in a call from his studio outside Philadelphia that season two doubles down on exposing the lies and secrets kept by all of the characters. “If season one was, ‘What happened to Jericho?’, then season two is, ‘What is this cult?’” the executive producer reveals. “This is how I talked with the writers and the directors about what the architecture and the movement of each season is.”
Though a disillusioned Leanne left the Turners’ home last season, she remains a huge part of the new season, as she’s forced to square off against an increasingly obsessed Dorothy, who thinks that the nanny kidnapped her child. That’s not the case, but the enablers who won’t tell Dorothy the truth about Jericho escalate the impasse between the two women.
“The idea that the main character [Dorothy] doesn’t understand the circumstances that they’re actually in, and is misunderstanding everything and is now acting on that misunderstanding, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that,” muses Shyamalan of the uniquely twisty and often darkly comedic tone of this season. “And it’s so great because she thinks her kid has been kidnapped and she’s doing these desperate things, but she has misunderstood everything and the people around her can’t tell her the truth – and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. This lie is spiralling, so she’s doing things that are, at times, reprehensible, yet you’re going, ‘But if I believed what she believed, I would do the same thing’.”
It’s a pressure cooker narrative heightened by the fact that 98% of the scenes continue to take place within the confines of the Turner house, a literal and metaphorical haunted house. “Keeping it in one location is a language that the audience will master,” Shyamalan enthuses. “And it’s because everything is so limited that each of the [show’s] ingredients are super, super important.” TB
Servant is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
This lie is spiralling, so she’s doing things that are, at times, reprehensible
MANY OF KEANU REEVES’S FILMS BOAST A COMIC BOOK quality. Now the Hollywood star has taken that one step further with BZRKR, his very own comic series for BOOM! Studios. “When I wrote the first draft of issue one, Keanu was like, ‘It needs to be more and much bigger’ and I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll turn it up’,” laughs co-writer Matt Kindt, who is joined by artist Ron Garney. “We just went headfirst into it, and even when the first pages of art came back, Keanu was like, ‘No, that’s not enough.’ We’re definitely using the comic book form to its full potential and really heightening everything.”
A half-mortal, half-god warrior, the Berserker himself – referred to as “B” – bears a distinct resemblance to his co-writer. “When we first talked about it, he was like, ‘It doesn’t need to be that way’, but when Keanu approaches writing the character, he really puts himself into the role,” reasons Kindt. “When you’re reading it, you can’t help putting him into it, and when we’re talking about B, Keanu will often flip into the first person. The connection between the character and him is more than superficial, and I’m glad that it looks like him.”
Having wandered the world’s battlefields for centuries, B is tasked with fighting the conflicts that are too tough for others. “In our first meeting, Keanu said he had a twist on it, which I’m not going to spoil,” says Kindt, adding that the story has heart along with a high body count. “He’s a crazed killing machine moving through time, but there’s something deeper to him that we’ll gradually reveal during the story.” SJ
BZRKR #1 is out on 17 February.