WATCH: Director - Writer - Producer M. Night Shyamalan talks his hit Apple TV+ series Servant on Pop Culture Weekly with Kyle McMahon
M. Night Shyamalan is a writer - director - producer - creative with over $3 billion in box office receipts. From his breakout hit The Sixth Sense in 1999 up to his most recent theatrical film Glass in 2019, Shyamalan has kept audiences (and critics) on their toes as our generations Alfred Hitchcock.
In November 2019, Apple TV+ debuted the first season of Servant, a series executive produced by Shyamalan. The series follows a young Philadelphia couple who tragically lost their baby who have taken to using a life like Living Doll to help work through their grief. The mother Dorothy (Six Feet Under's two time Emmy nominated Lauren Ambrose) takes this therapy too far, hiring a nanny (Game of Thrones Nell Tiger Free) to help care for the baby. Harry Potter franchise star Rupert Grint and Planet of the Apes franchise star Toby Kebbell round out the cast as Dorothy's brother Julian and the father Sean, respectively. I interviewed the cast for Pop Culture Weekly before the Season 1 premiere, which you can check out here.
Season 2 of Servant has now premiered, and I sat down with Shyamalan to discuss this twisty, edge of your seat thriller. When I asked what intrigued him about the premise of Servant, Shyamalan said: "Can you make an entire show in one location? I love that kind of play-like quality of it. So this idea that we're going to stay in this brownstone on Spruce Street in Philadelphia and never leave it and only see the outside world through devices here and there. It was very exciting for me."
Servant is essentially a show about grief and how different people handle it - or don't deal with it. Shyamalan tells me, "I saw this documentary on a father who forgot his child in the car and the child passed away. He had left him in the car in the sun. It was so, so upsetting... How could there be anything good in the world if that could happen? There's no lesson to be learned. There's no growth that's coming. He was a good man that loved his kid and just forgot. That's been, in a way, something that's driving me...Do I believe there's something good out there or am I just going to get dark? And I flip flop a lot on that....This incident and incidents like it, it feels like there's nothing good about it at all...and that's what the characters are struggling with and that engine underneath is the power of the show."
Check out my full Pop Culture Weekly interview with M. Night Shyamalan and the cast of Servant and my Servant review here. Servant streams exclusively on Apple TV+.
_______________________________________________
Check out Kyle Mcmahon's website, PopCultureWeekly.com and subscribe to the Pop Culture Weekly podcast. You can follow him on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Rizzle and Instagram.