<\/p>\n
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+\u2019s <\/a>new series The Savant<\/em>, just days before its launch. The show stars Jessica Chastain<\/a> as a profiler attempting to thwart terrorist activities in the United States by extreme-Right hate groups.<\/p>\n Although it is widely assumed that Apple did not want to air the series so soon after the assassination of Charlie Kirk<\/a>, the only public statement it has made is that \u201cafter careful consideration, we have made the decision to postpone The Savant<\/em>. We appreciate your understanding and look forward to releasing the series at a future date\u201d. (Chastain has released her own statement in which she says she\u2019s \u201cnot aligned\u201d with Apple\u2019s decision.)<\/p>\n So last-minute is the show\u2019s postponement \u2013 it was due to begin streaming on Friday September 26 \u2013 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\u2019s quotation, \u201cWhen tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty,\u201d and delivering an exhortatory broadcast to his followers. In the speech, the man says: \u201cThere was a day when we were born inheritors of a great nation\u2026 this is no longer the nation that I was born to inherit.\u201d<\/p>\n Sending out his message across the US, he tells his followers, \u201cyou\u2019re one back injury, one crushed thumb away from financial disaster\u201d and that, \u201cyou are a willing participant in your own subjugation\u201d. But this isn\u2019t just a mope about society. The would-be terrorists listening to him \u2013 \u201cthe real f—ing warriors out there\u201d \u2013 are instructed \u201cyour brothers in arms are ready\u201d, and that \u201cin order to have, you must take\u201d.<\/p>\n It\u2019s provocative, timely stuff. It is also presented as unequivocally wrong and evil within the decidedly Left-liberal world depicted in The Savant<\/em>, which has Chastain\u2019s eponymous \u201csavant\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Naturally, the antagonists in The Savant <\/em>are presented simply as villains, motivated merely by hatred and bigotry<\/a>. 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, \u201csnipers, bombings, ambushes, we\u2019re on the verge of serious violence\u201d and, in a line that must have caused ructions at Apple in the light of the Kirk killing, says of the main antagonist that \u201cthis guy isn\u2019t just planning violence, he\u2019s out to make a statement\u201d before grimly noting that \u201cinnocent Americans are going to die\u201d.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cIs it possible to stop a mass shooting before it happens?\u201d, which profiled an elite investigator, known only as \u201cthe Savant\u201d or \u201cK\u201d, who had served as a marine and a policewoman before channelling the skills she had developed into profiling and tracking \u201cthe men who hate women\u201d, like an incel-baiting<\/a> Sherlock Holmes.<\/p>\n Battling the \u201cmillennial misogynists\u201d as they are called, the article\u2019s \u201cSavant\u201d suggested that \u201cthey have a product they want to sell and that product is hate. When you see a bunch of normal-looking guys, you think, \u2018How bad could it be?\u2019 But violent men don\u2019t have to look any different from kind men\u201d.<\/p>\n