It is rare for high-profile shows to be unceremoniously yanked off the release schedule, but that is exactly what has happened to Apple TV+’s new series The Savant, just days before its launch. The show stars Jessica Chastain as a profiler attempting to thwart terrorist activities in the United States by extreme-Right hate groups.
Although it is widely assumed that Apple did not want to air the series so soon after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the only public statement it has made is that “after careful consideration, we have made the decision to postpone The Savant. We appreciate your understanding and look forward to releasing the series at a future date”. (Chastain has released her own statement in which she says she’s “not aligned” with Apple’s decision.)
So last-minute is the show’s postponement – it was due to begin streaming on Friday September 26 – episodes had already been made available to reviewers, which allows writers to have a clear idea of potentially controversial content. Certainly, the show does not shy away from tackling the hot-button issue of far-Right terrorism. The first episode begins with an anonymous masked man sitting down in front of a flag emblazoned with Thomas Jefferson’s quotation, “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty,” and delivering an exhortatory broadcast to his followers. In the speech, the man says: “There was a day when we were born inheritors of a great nation… this is no longer the nation that I was born to inherit.”
Sending out his message across the US, he tells his followers, “you’re one back injury, one crushed thumb away from financial disaster” and that, “you are a willing participant in your own subjugation”. But this isn’t just a mope about society. The would-be terrorists listening to him – “the real f—ing warriors out there” – are instructed “your brothers in arms are ready”, and that “in order to have, you must take”.
It’s provocative, timely stuff. It is also presented as unequivocally wrong and evil within the decidedly Left-liberal world depicted in The Savant, which has Chastain’s eponymous “savant” Jodi Goodwin working with the forces of law enforcement as an investigator to stop these men in their murderous tracks, even as they plan ever-greater outrages.
Naturally, the antagonists in The Savant are presented simply as villains, motivated merely by hatred and bigotry. And they are deadly. There is an (off-screen) mass shooting in the first episode, a thwarted bomb attack on a government building shortly afterwards, and the successful assassination of one of the protagonists in a shocking scene at the end of the second episode. As Goodwin says, “snipers, bombings, ambushes, we’re on the verge of serious violence” and, in a line that must have caused ructions at Apple in the light of the Kirk killing, says of the main antagonist that “this guy isn’t just planning violence, he’s out to make a statement” before grimly noting that “innocent Americans are going to die”.
How far the terrorists succeed is, of course, a spoiler, but the question is less whether the show fulfils its artistic ambitions and more whether its depiction of all-American violence really merited its being yanked off air altogether. It was based on a 2019 Cosmopolitan article by Andrea Stanley, entitled “Is it possible to stop a mass shooting before it happens?”, which profiled an elite investigator, known only as “the Savant” or “K”, who had served as a marine and a policewoman before channelling the skills she had developed into profiling and tracking “the men who hate women”, like an incel-baiting Sherlock Holmes.
Battling the “millennial misogynists” as they are called, the article’s “Savant” suggested that “they have a product they want to sell and that product is hate. When you see a bunch of normal-looking guys, you think, ‘How bad could it be?’ But violent men don’t have to look any different from kind men”.
The potential parallels with Kirk’s supposed assassin, Tyler Robinson, remain uncertain. Robinson was not one of the bearded knuckle-draggers who are depicted in the show, instead being a clean-cut 22-year-old university drop-out. Likewise, his political affiliation is unknown, although both Donald Trump and JD Vance have described him as a radical Leftist. Certainly, Robinson would have been far harder to track than the antagonists in The Savant. He did not have an ex-military background as many of them do, nor is there any record of his making misogynistic or hateful comments in public.
Parallels between the terrorists in The Savant and Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin remain uncertain. (Pictured: Kirk speaking at a Trump rally in 2024)
Indeed, the recent Eddie Redmayne series The Day of the Jackal, in which Redmayne’s unnervingly boyish assassin prepares to kill a tech entrepreneur, has more in common with Kirk’s murder than anything depicted in The Savant, and there have been no calls retrospectively to ban that.
The outlook of The Savant, then, is closer to Hollywood fantasy than reality. Just as Stanley’s initial article attracted criticism for its lack of curiosity about what radicalised men of all ages – and did not even come close to suggesting that their anger might have a justifiable basis in society’s apparent disdain for them – so the show it has now spawned sticks to similarly binary ideas of good and bad.
As the Kirk controversy has shown, life is more complicated than this, and villains do not always usefully dwell in corners spouting their hateful and murderous ideology. The show did not need to be postponed; it would have been far more helpful if the themes it addresses had, however, been given rather greater scrutiny in the first place.
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