While thinking about Servant’s fantastic three seasons, I’ve been considering the strangeness of how all three characters Lauren Ambrose has played regularly on television (save in Torchwood) are connected by a thread of grief and refusal to move on from trauma and loss. They are three very different people, and yet feel thematically linked. Six Feet Under's Claire Fisher, whom Ambrose embodied the longest, is growing up with the constant presence of grief and loss in her parents’ funeral home and she has just lost her father when we first meet her. One of the most well-known scenes of the show that even people who’ve never watched it may have encountered on social media is from the last episode, when Claire finally takes off to begin her own life in New York, and takes a final picture of her family. An apparition of Nate, her older brother who has passed away from brain cancer, tells her that she can’t take a picture of this – it’s already gone. As an artist, capturing moments is what Claire does to make sense of things, but the whole theme of Six Feet Under is impermanence – every episode begins with a death – and the famous ending that shows each of the characters final moment is an eloquent way to drive home the point that everyone dies, even if the show throughout its run allows dead characters to return as ghosts (or embodied memories – there’s nothing traditionally haunting about these apparitions) who comment on the lives of their loved ones long after they themselves have passed.
Last year, Lauren Ambrose was cast as adult Van Palmer (a character eerily apt at survival) in Yellowjackets, and the first time we encounter her is in a video store – a lovingly curated space, but also, in the present time, a time capsule of the past that directly references the time period a younger Van went through the trauma of the plane crash and survival in the wilderness back in the mid-90s. She rents out video cassette tapes, not DVDs, and this dedication to an obsolete technology means that she keeps having to explain to her younger customers how to use a VCR. On the surface, it’s a quirky (maybe even hipster) dedication to the past, but there are other signs that Van is very much arrested in time, as if preserved in amber, that her way of dealing with the past is circling it endlessly, in her cozy little shop, while her financial problems and addiction issues escalate and remain unaddressed. It feels like a realistic reaction to a period of time that was incredibly traumatic, and, in Yellowjackets’ second season, becomes more and more violent and incomprehensible.
I only began watching Servant after having seen Ambrose’s Van, and on the surface, the first thing that struck me about Dorothy Turner was how different she is from both Van and Claire Fisher, who would both likely loathe her. Dorothy grew up with privilege and money, and is very much a product of both: not in any way interested in counter culture, dedicated to outward signs of wealth, arrogant and dismissive towards Leanne, the “help” she’s hired to look after her son Jericho. She is a successful television journalist and eager to return to work, while her husband Sean (played by Toby Kebbell, who proves in Servant that For All Mankind criminally underused his talents) is an up-and-coming chef (the first season very much uses the same aesthetic approach to his cooking that Chef’s Table does, and very deliberately). They live in a gorgeously renovated Philadelphia town house. But as soon as the show kicks off, it immediately becomes obvious how of that surface is hiding underneath. There’s the big twist right at the beginning: Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) has been hired to look after Jericho, the Turner’s baby, but there is no baby, only a life-like doll that, as we soon find out, Dorothy very much believes is her actual baby, while everybody else plays along. It takes a while for Sean to explain to Leanne that this replacement doll has been suggested to help Dorothy deal with the loss of their actual child some time ago, after which she became catatonic, and the twist is that Leanne finds nothing strange about this at all: she plays along perfectly, treating the doll like a human child to an extent that seems to be freaking out Sean (and Dorothy’s brother Julian, who maybe goes through the greatest change as the series unfolds, but is an insufferable ass to start off with). Leanne, eighteen and from Wisconsin, also turns out to be much more than she seems: she appears to the Turners as sheltered, meek, deeply religious. But then, the doll is replaced with an actual baby.
It's interesting to think about Servant as a companion piece of sorts to The Leftovers, in which the cataclysmic loss affects almost everyone in the world, and creates a different reality of grief on a global scale. Jericho’s loss and magical reappearance in Servant, by contrast, plays out within the constraints of the Turner’s home and life, contained within the four walls like a chamber play. Sean and Julian cannot acknowledge that anything has changed, because to Dorothy, nothing has: where they have both suffered the trauma of losing Jericho, the months of painful pretense with the doll, and now the shock of finding an actual baby returned to the home, Dorothy has had a continuous experience without any breaks in it, and her loved ones have to continue the charade because they fear what would happen if she realised that her son has died. It’s a trap of their own making that limits their ability to act. Their suspicion, and the only rational explanation they can come up with, is that Leanne has somehow tricked them, either passing her own baby or a stranger’s off as Jericho. They begin investigating her background, and things get weirder and weirder the more they find.
One of my favourite things about Servant is its unpredictability, how much it embraces its own weirdness (in the interesting time constraint of thirty-minute episodes, a rarity for a drama/horror thriller). Toby and Julian, with the help of a private investigator, realise that Leanne was raised in a cult with weird beliefs, and the remnants of that cult soon begin infiltrating the Turner’s lives. Character, throughout the series, fluctuate in their perception and acceptance of what is happening – it takes a while for threads to really crystallize, which only really begins happening once Leanne begins developing and starts being surer of herself. Nell Tiger Free’s performance is incredible in this, especially as Leanne embraces what she perceives as her power, and battles down in a household that frequently treats her as unwelcome, insisting that they make a family together, because a loving family is what she has yearned for her whole life. Leanne is a fascinating character – an eighteen-year-old who was raised to believe that she had to serve, had little agency, who is growing into someone powerful and self-assured the more she situates herself in the Turner household. Her presence also begins to reveal how much of that household is a facade: she brings out the worst in Dorothy, who lashes out when she loses control. She lives in a part of the house that hasn’t been renovated, so following her means going to the creepy parts of the house that feel like its true nature, as if everything else is just paint covering up its history. The basement (containing the extensive and very expensive collection of wines that are frequently drunk) becomes an uncontrollable entity that keeps acting up, turning into a quagmire in spite of frequents attempts to fix it somehow. There are enough nooks and crevices in the house that the burnt corpse of someone who came after Leanne remains indefinitely hidden. It’s as if the house becomes an extension of Leanne, controlled by her own emotions – her anger creates damage, her desperation brings plagues of termites and moths (it’s like Leanne is haunting the house, but at the same time, grief is, and sometimes Dorothy). Eventually her power seems to extend beyond the house into the street, beyond the street into the whole city. The show presents a rational explanation for everything, as if all these strange events only appear connected through the eyes of its increasingly paranoid and bewildered protagonists, but the mystical, or religious interpretation stays just as valid: Leanne is whatever the viewer decides she is, either a scarily powerful entity that grows in power the more her identity is allowed to develop, the surer her footing becomes, or a delusional young woman deeply traumatised by the cult that raised her, desperate for connection and love that she feels she can only attain through deception and force. I’m ambivalent about the ending – I think Leanne would have deserved exactly what she yearned for – but in the end, Servant is a show about unresolved grief and what happens when grief remains unaddressed. Dorothy cannot move on, or continue existing, if she doesn’t eventually address the abyss that was created the day that she lost Jericho. The show takes a long time to reveal what really happened that day: Sean, frustrated by the limitations of his role as a father, decided to take a gig as a guest presenter in a cooking competition show in Los Angeles. Without his support, with a constantly crying baby in a sweltering city, Dorothy became overwhelmed. A desperate phone call to her brother remained unanswered (and he never really gets over that guilt, it drives his whole character). She forgot Jericho in the car, during a heatwave. It’s a gravity well, not unlike the one that exists in The Haunting of Bly Manor, a single act of desperation that changes everything around it. Servant’s animating force is that this doesn’t feel like something that has torn the family apart. Sean feels guilty for having left Dorothy, and he loves her deeply (a rare kind of love to find on television in straight married couples – it reminded me of the otherwise very different Santa Clarita Diet, where Van Palmer’s young alter ego Liv Hewson got their start). Julian, in spite of how insufferable he is throughout the first season, loves his sister, and knows that his inaction played a part in the loss. Both men forge connections with the new, mysterious baby, in spite of being fairly certain that he isn’t really Jericho. As much as Dorothy is the only character who, on the surface, has not suffered the loss because her brain has removed it from her memory, she feels substantially changed by it too, as if the labour of forgetting has forced a mask on her that keeps her ability to really connect, or show empathy, limited. There’s a moment in the final episode in which Dorothy, having finally remembered, has the first encounter with Leanne that feels true, where she feels like a whole person again, capable of the full range of emotions. It shows how outstanding Lauren Ambrose’s performance is in the series, having played Dorothy as so removed and distant throughout, that this connection now feels like the first real thing she has done in years, like Dorothy has finally become fully human again. Dorothy has to embrace her, and as easy as it would be to embrace what Leanne offers: a return to a normalcy where they are all back in the house, with Jericho in their midst to bind them together forever – she knows that she will be never be whole unless she begins addressing Jericho’s death. I still wish there had been a way for Leanne to survive, but then I guess the whole point was that Leanne presence is predicated on Jericho’s, who she was hired to care for. What a great, strange, ambitious show.
2019-2023, created by Tony Basgallop, starring Lauren Ambrose, Nell Tiger Free, Toby Kebbell, Rupert Grint, Tony Revolon, Bons McGiver.
Last year, Lauren Ambrose was cast as adult Van Palmer (a character eerily apt at survival) in Yellowjackets, and the first time we encounter her is in a video store – a lovingly curated space, but also, in the present time, a time capsule of the past that directly references the time period a younger Van went through the trauma of the plane crash and survival in the wilderness back in the mid-90s. She rents out video cassette tapes, not DVDs, and this dedication to an obsolete technology means that she keeps having to explain to her younger customers how to use a VCR. On the surface, it’s a quirky (maybe even hipster) dedication to the past, but there are other signs that Van is very much arrested in time, as if preserved in amber, that her way of dealing with the past is circling it endlessly, in her cozy little shop, while her financial problems and addiction issues escalate and remain unaddressed. It feels like a realistic reaction to a period of time that was incredibly traumatic, and, in Yellowjackets’ second season, becomes more and more violent and incomprehensible.
I only began watching Servant after having seen Ambrose’s Van, and on the surface, the first thing that struck me about Dorothy Turner was how different she is from both Van and Claire Fisher, who would both likely loathe her. Dorothy grew up with privilege and money, and is very much a product of both: not in any way interested in counter culture, dedicated to outward signs of wealth, arrogant and dismissive towards Leanne, the “help” she’s hired to look after her son Jericho. She is a successful television journalist and eager to return to work, while her husband Sean (played by Toby Kebbell, who proves in Servant that For All Mankind criminally underused his talents) is an up-and-coming chef (the first season very much uses the same aesthetic approach to his cooking that Chef’s Table does, and very deliberately). They live in a gorgeously renovated Philadelphia town house. But as soon as the show kicks off, it immediately becomes obvious how of that surface is hiding underneath. There’s the big twist right at the beginning: Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) has been hired to look after Jericho, the Turner’s baby, but there is no baby, only a life-like doll that, as we soon find out, Dorothy very much believes is her actual baby, while everybody else plays along. It takes a while for Sean to explain to Leanne that this replacement doll has been suggested to help Dorothy deal with the loss of their actual child some time ago, after which she became catatonic, and the twist is that Leanne finds nothing strange about this at all: she plays along perfectly, treating the doll like a human child to an extent that seems to be freaking out Sean (and Dorothy’s brother Julian, who maybe goes through the greatest change as the series unfolds, but is an insufferable ass to start off with). Leanne, eighteen and from Wisconsin, also turns out to be much more than she seems: she appears to the Turners as sheltered, meek, deeply religious. But then, the doll is replaced with an actual baby.
It's interesting to think about Servant as a companion piece of sorts to The Leftovers, in which the cataclysmic loss affects almost everyone in the world, and creates a different reality of grief on a global scale. Jericho’s loss and magical reappearance in Servant, by contrast, plays out within the constraints of the Turner’s home and life, contained within the four walls like a chamber play. Sean and Julian cannot acknowledge that anything has changed, because to Dorothy, nothing has: where they have both suffered the trauma of losing Jericho, the months of painful pretense with the doll, and now the shock of finding an actual baby returned to the home, Dorothy has had a continuous experience without any breaks in it, and her loved ones have to continue the charade because they fear what would happen if she realised that her son has died. It’s a trap of their own making that limits their ability to act. Their suspicion, and the only rational explanation they can come up with, is that Leanne has somehow tricked them, either passing her own baby or a stranger’s off as Jericho. They begin investigating her background, and things get weirder and weirder the more they find.
One of my favourite things about Servant is its unpredictability, how much it embraces its own weirdness (in the interesting time constraint of thirty-minute episodes, a rarity for a drama/horror thriller). Toby and Julian, with the help of a private investigator, realise that Leanne was raised in a cult with weird beliefs, and the remnants of that cult soon begin infiltrating the Turner’s lives. Character, throughout the series, fluctuate in their perception and acceptance of what is happening – it takes a while for threads to really crystallize, which only really begins happening once Leanne begins developing and starts being surer of herself. Nell Tiger Free’s performance is incredible in this, especially as Leanne embraces what she perceives as her power, and battles down in a household that frequently treats her as unwelcome, insisting that they make a family together, because a loving family is what she has yearned for her whole life. Leanne is a fascinating character – an eighteen-year-old who was raised to believe that she had to serve, had little agency, who is growing into someone powerful and self-assured the more she situates herself in the Turner household. Her presence also begins to reveal how much of that household is a facade: she brings out the worst in Dorothy, who lashes out when she loses control. She lives in a part of the house that hasn’t been renovated, so following her means going to the creepy parts of the house that feel like its true nature, as if everything else is just paint covering up its history. The basement (containing the extensive and very expensive collection of wines that are frequently drunk) becomes an uncontrollable entity that keeps acting up, turning into a quagmire in spite of frequents attempts to fix it somehow. There are enough nooks and crevices in the house that the burnt corpse of someone who came after Leanne remains indefinitely hidden. It’s as if the house becomes an extension of Leanne, controlled by her own emotions – her anger creates damage, her desperation brings plagues of termites and moths (it’s like Leanne is haunting the house, but at the same time, grief is, and sometimes Dorothy). Eventually her power seems to extend beyond the house into the street, beyond the street into the whole city. The show presents a rational explanation for everything, as if all these strange events only appear connected through the eyes of its increasingly paranoid and bewildered protagonists, but the mystical, or religious interpretation stays just as valid: Leanne is whatever the viewer decides she is, either a scarily powerful entity that grows in power the more her identity is allowed to develop, the surer her footing becomes, or a delusional young woman deeply traumatised by the cult that raised her, desperate for connection and love that she feels she can only attain through deception and force. I’m ambivalent about the ending – I think Leanne would have deserved exactly what she yearned for – but in the end, Servant is a show about unresolved grief and what happens when grief remains unaddressed. Dorothy cannot move on, or continue existing, if she doesn’t eventually address the abyss that was created the day that she lost Jericho. The show takes a long time to reveal what really happened that day: Sean, frustrated by the limitations of his role as a father, decided to take a gig as a guest presenter in a cooking competition show in Los Angeles. Without his support, with a constantly crying baby in a sweltering city, Dorothy became overwhelmed. A desperate phone call to her brother remained unanswered (and he never really gets over that guilt, it drives his whole character). She forgot Jericho in the car, during a heatwave. It’s a gravity well, not unlike the one that exists in The Haunting of Bly Manor, a single act of desperation that changes everything around it. Servant’s animating force is that this doesn’t feel like something that has torn the family apart. Sean feels guilty for having left Dorothy, and he loves her deeply (a rare kind of love to find on television in straight married couples – it reminded me of the otherwise very different Santa Clarita Diet, where Van Palmer’s young alter ego Liv Hewson got their start). Julian, in spite of how insufferable he is throughout the first season, loves his sister, and knows that his inaction played a part in the loss. Both men forge connections with the new, mysterious baby, in spite of being fairly certain that he isn’t really Jericho. As much as Dorothy is the only character who, on the surface, has not suffered the loss because her brain has removed it from her memory, she feels substantially changed by it too, as if the labour of forgetting has forced a mask on her that keeps her ability to really connect, or show empathy, limited. There’s a moment in the final episode in which Dorothy, having finally remembered, has the first encounter with Leanne that feels true, where she feels like a whole person again, capable of the full range of emotions. It shows how outstanding Lauren Ambrose’s performance is in the series, having played Dorothy as so removed and distant throughout, that this connection now feels like the first real thing she has done in years, like Dorothy has finally become fully human again. Dorothy has to embrace her, and as easy as it would be to embrace what Leanne offers: a return to a normalcy where they are all back in the house, with Jericho in their midst to bind them together forever – she knows that she will be never be whole unless she begins addressing Jericho’s death. I still wish there had been a way for Leanne to survive, but then I guess the whole point was that Leanne presence is predicated on Jericho’s, who she was hired to care for. What a great, strange, ambitious show.
2019-2023, created by Tony Basgallop, starring Lauren Ambrose, Nell Tiger Free, Toby Kebbell, Rupert Grint, Tony Revolon, Bons McGiver.
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