So we knew that the creepy baby in M. Night Shyamalan’s new Apple TV+ show was gonna be, well, creepy. Somehow—somehow—we were not adequately prepared for just how goddamn creepy it is.
Just… watch for yourself.
Early teasers for Servant focused on the premise that this was a show about a young family and their child…who happened to be a doll. There were teases about the trauma that lead to this fake baby being treated like a real baby, and that said baby would be, of course, part of some creepy shit—it’s M. Night Goddamn Shyamalan, for crying out loud—but the first full trailer for the series dives deep, and it’s so much more than we thought it would be.
Starring Lauren Ambrose, Toby Kebbell, Nell Tiger Free, and Rupert Grint, Servant follows Kebbell and Ambrose’s couple as they hire a new nanny (Free) for their child, Jericho. Said Nanny is weirdly cool with the whole “so you’re nanny-ing a fake baby” sitch—a sitch brought about by the traumatic death of the real Jericho just 13 weeks after his birth. So in order to prevent his wife from having a complete psychotic breakdown, Sean (Kebbell) and his friend (Grint) made an incredibly lifelike replica, which now has an incredibly gung-ho nanny.
That’s weird enough, but the question becomes less about the fake baby and more like why is she so cool with the fake baby? And from there, everything goes to hell. Maybe literally, who knows…this is Shyamalan, after all. There is a lot going on with this mum’s existential trauma, this fake baby, and this very creepy nanny who might be some kind of supernatural force looking to turn this fake baby into some kind of unholy monstrosity, presumably. Anything is possible.
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So, you know, just another Shyamalan horror adventure. Servant heads to Apple TV+ on November 28.