Servant season 3 recap: Apple’s spooky M. Night Shyamalan show returns

For a show that ain’t about the internet servant is one of the online shows you can watch. Maybe that doesn’t make immediate sense – it’s a series about a couple who hires a creepy live-in nanny and a baby doll who seem to have come to life – but the parallels are there. It is a claustrophobic psychological thriller set entirely in a family’s expensive Philadelphia townhouse. Said family only interacts with the outside world through screens – and almost as a result, they slowly sink into a veil of paranoia and distrust. Over time, their closed little world becomes so nonsensical that they lose all sense of what “normal” means, to the point that the girl they locked in the attic in the Season 3 premiere is now a member her happy family is. servant, in other words, is great television.

[Ed. note: Minor spoilers for Servant seasons 1 and 2 follow]

Created by British author Tony Basgallop and co-executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, who is directing a number of episodes. servant is an Apple TV Plus psychological thriller about Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) and Sean (Toby Kebbell) Turner, a wealthy Philadelphia couple who hire the mysterious Leanne Grayson (Nell Tiger Free) to be their live-in nanny for their son Jericho . The twist in the show’s pilot is that Jericho isn’t a real boy — he’s a doll that an unlicensed therapist prescribed Dorothy as a radical therapy exercise after the loss of her real-life son Jericho left her catatonic for a time.

But that’s enough for a chilling thriller alone servant keeps the twists coming. At the end of the pilot, the Jericho doll is somehow alive thanks to Leanne and it’s not clear if she stole a new baby to replace the doll or if she has supernatural powers of some sort. Coming to Season 3, which premiered Friday, there’s an entire cult and disturbing soul-freeing ritual involved, and again, all of this is happening without leaving this one house.

With so much television out there, it’s tempting to exaggerate a show’s individual quirks or make a creative team’s weird quirks seem weirder than they are — understand that meanwhile servant feels like nothing else on TV because few shows are brave enough to trap you in a house with its characters for one 40 episodes planned‘ Worth what other shows would call a bottle episode, watching three characters gaslight each other to make them think their deranged behavior is okay. Maybe there’s a reason for that! binging servant feels a bit like scrolling through social media for too long or eating nothing but carbs for a week – you’re not unwell and probably working but okay levels are all wrong.

It’s probably because of something servant Doing Well: With M. Night Shyamalan leading the way in the pilot and returning again and again, the series feels like one of his films, a story that takes the shared dynamic of a grieving family and then through an odd concept and uncomfortable Close-up shots, disconcerting distance and depressingly dark lighting and stage design make everything appear alien and foreign again. Where servant uses its length to his advantage in how he then turns midway to stitch that strangeness backup, and integrates Leanne and the perhaps resurrected Jericho into a happier version of the Turner family – after a full season of kidnapping and torture by Leanne.

Outside perspectives are gradually brought in – first in the form of Dorothy’s brother Julian (Rupert Grint) and later in a character played by Spider-Man Homecoming‘s Tony Revolori — and warped to fit into, or be used by, this oddly found family, one in which the roles of victim and villain shift to the point where you’re not sure who you are anymore see. In this, servant is partly a show about oppression and denial – there’s the initial metaphor of Dorothy’s therapeutic baby doll, but as the show progresses, Leanne’s past in a cruel, controlling cult becomes the focus. Through ventilation these people advance and come together, and in doing so the house becomes a place of strength rather than a trap. But that assumes they stay honest – and Season 3 focuses on a rot from within as threats build from the outside.

With Leanne and the Turners now a family, Leanne’s cult has become a threat to that family and the season opens with a character study of Leanne being home alone while the Turners head off to a beach weekend and ponder what they are found and fears she may lose it. Alone, Leanne begins to feel a new paranoia – first harmlessly symbolized by moths, later more openly by a burglar.

Like many works related to Shyamalan, servant is sly and quietly funny – regular news clips that run on TV serve as insane nonsequiturs about brawls over fried chicken sandwiches or mall wind tunnels, while a game of impossibly tense charades inspires a woman to mimic a caterpillar in an evening dress on the living room floor – but it’s also about real human pain, which is convincingly guided through the performances of Ambrose, Kebbell and Free.

“When something bad happens and you pretend it didn’t happen,” Grint’s Julien tells Leanne midway through season two, “it eats up your insides.” And once again, this not-very-online show speaks to a fundamental one Truth of online life that is almost completely inseparable from regular life: it’s a world where we move on, post and work, pretending nothing bad happened. How lazy, one wonders, has our normalcy become?

The first episode of servant Season 3 is now on Apple TV Plus. New episodes appear every Friday.