Nanny State
The cult is coming in Servant season three
EVER MADE A Lifechanging choice and then panicked about the repercussions? That’s what’s facing former cult member and current nanny Leanne Grayson (Nell Tiger Free) in the latest, third season of Apple TV+’S horror drama Servant.
After killing Josephine, the emissary for the Church of Lesser Saints cult that claimed Leanne as their own, the young nanny with strange powers is now even more deeply ensconced in the home of Dorothy and Sean Turner (Lauren Ambrose and Toby Kebbell). With Leanne terrified that the cult is waiting for her or baby Jericho outside the house, there’s a palpable sense of dread creeping into this season’s arc.
Ishana Night Shyamalan (daughter of executive producer M Night Shyamalan) is writing and directing episodes of Servant for a second season. She tells Red Alert that audiences should expect a bit of a calm in the Turners’ house before the big storm comes.
“There’s an attempt at the beginning of the season to create this forced family dynamic,” Shyamalan says of Leanne and the Turners. “That is so interesting, and so tense, but also in many ways profound and beautiful. You’re given a tease of, ‘What does life look like if this family can make it work?’”
Asked if there’s a central theme being explored this season, Shyamalan says her take on it is that there are two main paths. “One is the arc of Leanne grappling with her own darkness. She’s in that place where you start to see yourself doing things that are dark, or thinking in a way that’s dark, and then how do you cope with that? And then the other element is the relationship between these two women, Leanne and Dorothy, and this back and forth that happens, and the tension and the anger and the love that exists there. There’s definitely a winding evolution to that relationship.”
Responsible for the second episode of this season, “Hive”, and the season finale, Shyamalan teases that her two episodes will again be wildly disparate in tone and intention. She also says that this claustrophobic show, which is almost entirely contained within the Turner home, will open up a bit more. “We always had this idea that as each season goes by, we introduce a bigger part of the world,” she teases. “In season three, you’ll learn a new space.
And we expand to more characters that are coming in, which is all very exciting to enhance what the Servant world is, and for you to understand it.”
The series has already been picked up for a fourth season, which will also be its last. Asked if we should expect a signature ambiguous M Night Shyamalan finale to the story, she promises that there will definitely be answers. “We’re trying to straddle this sense of mystery, but also giving enough mythology and understanding of the world to keep people invested,” she says.
“In each episode, you’re gaining just enough information to formulate your own theories and your own ideas and get to the next episode and the next episode. I think that persists all the way to the end. And I think when you come out of it, you’ll feel a great understanding of what you watched, with also some mysteries left there just for fun too.” TB
Servant season three is streaming on Apple TV+ now.