Jessica Chastain's new series The Savant could help stop violence in a digital age – so why delay it?

This question is precisely what Apple TV+’s upcoming show The Savant wants to interrogate. How can we stop acts of violence occurring before they happen? How do we recognise the red flags? How can tragedy be prevented before it’s had the chance to become one in the first place?

Inspired by a 2019 Cosmopolitan article detailing the life of a woman who infiltrates online extremist groups to prevent acts of mass violence, the show isn’t interested in over-dramatising its brutality. Uniquely, it instead aims to examine extremism at its source: in digital whispers, online forums and dark corners of the internet.

Which is why the recent news that The Savant has been indefinitely delayed, reportedly due to recent, condemnable violent acts in the US, feels like it’s such a huge mistake.

Though previously due to arrive on the platform this upcoming Friday, last night an Apple TV+ spokesperson explained in a statement: "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."

Of course, it’s understandable to see why networks and streamers are cautious of releasing such a harrowing series during a tense news cycle, when fiction is so closely echoing reality. But in this volatile, unpredictable climate we are living through, it’s not more silence we need – it’s clarity, it’s learning, it’s prevention. And that’s precisely what The Savant aims to make its viewers understand through its eight episodes. It just needs audiences to see them.

The Savant hasn’t been alone in its concerns. Just earlier this year, Netflix released four-part drama Adolescence onto its platform, a show that floored audiences with its portrayal of a 13-year-old boy who is accused of murdering his classmate by stabbing her seven times in the car park behind their school – prompting worldwide scrutiny of toxic incel culture and the online “manosphere”.

These shows serve as warnings. Signs that the red flags are always there – that a child showing his classmate a video of a beheading might actually be something that we should be concerned about, that when a young boy starts calling his mother a “b***h” because he heard some bitter man online doing it and thought it was funny, we tell him that it’s not okay before he becomes that same faceless man he’s seen in the videos. Or something worse.

In an age of digital obsession, where conversations are no longer happening in small, quiet backrooms and instead in very wide, very encrypted, online spaces, they're increasingly becoming harder and harder to monitor – and more of it is happening.

We’re no longer shocked when we hear another mass shooting has taken place, that another innocent life has been lost for some inconceivable reason that will no doubt be spun into political rhetoric and not mourned as the death of another living, breathing human being.

We’re exhausted by it. We don't keep the news on in the background anymore while we work from home or eat our dinner, out of fear we’ll accidentally stumble upon another story we didn’t want to – instead, we scroll past headlines and turn the channel to something that can distract us, something to make us forget that the horror outside our fronts doors is only a few inches from crawling in.

And that’s why the delay of The Savant is so frustrating. Once again, we’re choosing to look away from the issues we need to confront directly – even when the issues are stood in front of us, screaming at us in the face, asking us to understand them, to intervene, to stop them.

As lead actor Jessica Chastain herself put it: “I hate that this show is relevant, but maybe through this conversation and through unearthing this darkness in society, then we're gonna work together to fix it.”

Classically, we might not view television as an intervention. Historically, these kinds of shows have always worked to solve problems backwards – from the aftermath to the origins, but in the case of The Savant, it’s exactly the origin that is most important.

Of course, no TV show alone can stop a shooting – and it would be unethical to suggest as much. What it can do, though, is shift perspective; help us rebuild the narrative from punishment to prevention, and teach us what violence can look like before lives are lost.

“How didn’t we see it coming?”

We could have. We just looked away.

The Savant will premiere on Apple TV+ – sign up to Apple TV+ now.

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