The first season of Servant coasted by almost entirely on creepy atmosphere, making its way through 10 episodes without offering concrete answers about the strange happenings in the Turner household. The slow building of suspense only goes so far in an ongoing series, and Servant returns for its second season with a level of urgency from the characters that’s never matched by what’s actually happening on screen. The show’s protagonists are as eager as the audience to find out what’s going on, but at least in the first six episodes of the 10-episode season, nobody is getting any satisfaction.
At the end of the first season of Servant, potentially sinister nanny Leanne Grayson (Nell Tiger Free) disappeared along with the Turners’ infant son Jericho. Or at least with a baby that everyone called Jericho, since the actual son of Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) and Sean (Toby Kebbell) had died months earlier as a result of Dorothy’s neglect. The big mystery of the first season was where this new baby had come from. Sean worked with Dorothy’s brother Julian (Rupert Grint) to hire Leanne to care for a lifelike doll that Dorothy believed, in her traumatized brain, was the real Jericho.
But soon after Leanne arrived, there was a real baby in Jericho’s crib instead of a doll, and Dorothy wasn’t the only character whose sanity came into question. Did Leanne have magical powers that allowed her to bring Jericho back to life? Did she kidnap someone else’s baby in a misguided ploy to help Dorothy with her grief? How was this connected to a mysterious cult where Leanne apparently grew up? None of those questions was answered in the first season, although Leanne’s intensely unsettling “aunt” (Alison Elliott) and “uncle” (Boris McGiver) showed up to try to bring her back to the cult.
As the second season of Servant opens, Leanne and Jericho are both still missing, and Dorothy is frantic to find them, although Sean and Julian are in damage-control mode to prevent anyone from finding out that Jericho isn’t Jericho and Dorothy is mentally unstable. The extent of Dorothy’s trauma-induced delusion has grown absurd as the show has progressed, and the creators put the characters through increasingly elaborate ruses to avoid confronting her with the truth.
Ambrose escalates her already mannered performance from the first season, turning Dorothy into a nearly unhinged maniac, especially once she locates Leanne and brings her back to the Turner home against her will. Dorothy goes from sympathetic to irritating as Ambrose’s acting becomes almost cartoonish.
McGiver eventually also returns as Uncle George, but even with all this activity, the characters come no closer to finding out what happened to Jericho or where the impostor baby came from in the first place. As in the first season of Servant, there are moments that hint at Leanne’s potential supernatural abilities, especially as Sean seems to be afflicted with and then cured of physical ailments miraculously. But creator Tony Basgallop (joined this season by a handful of other credited writers) continues to play coy, always backing away from any clear indication of the supernatural.
That makes watching Servant a frustrating experience, and the audience goodwill may be running thin as the creators continue to tease major developments with episode-ending cliffhangers, only to back away from them by the beginning of the next episode. As in the first season, almost all of the action is contained within the labyrinthine Turner house, which seems to grow new rooms and levels as needed by the plot. Keeping the characters inside the house proves difficult as they mount a search for the missing baby, though, and there are some laughable plot developments (including the creation of an entire fake pizza-delivery business) to justify their remaining at home.
Executive producer M. Night Shyamalan set the template for Servant’s use of off-kilter camera angles and unconventional blocking, and he and the season’s other directors (including his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan) continue to find new ways to make the Turner house look foreboding. But with Leanne’s presence diminished, the sense of something evil invading a previously happy home is diminished as well, and Free, so entertainingly menacing in the first season, is mostly reduced to whining and pleading.
With the plot mostly stalled, the creators resort to flashbacks that reveal nothing new, padding out the already short episodes. The 30-minute running time can be a bonus, giving episodes a chance to deliver a few jolts and then leave viewers wanting more, but it also makes Servant feel insubstantial. It’s possible that the story will move forward in the final episodes of the season, or in the third season that Apple TV+ has already ordered. But in constantly keeping its answers out of reach, Servant is just jerking its audience around, and no amount of spooky noises or ominous pronouncements can make up for that.
Starring Lauren Ambrose, Toby Kebbell, Nell Tiger Free and Rupert Grint, the second season of Servant premieres Friday, Jan. 15 on Apple TV+, with subsequent episodes debuting each Friday.