M. Night Shyamalan has won his Servant plagiarism lawsuit

A federal jury has cleared M. Night Shyamalan and his fellow creatives on Apple TV+ series Servant of charges of plagiarism. Per Variety, the jury handed down the verdict on Friday evening, ruling that Shyamalan and his team did not copy filmmaker Francesca Gregorini’s The Truth About Emanuel when creating the thriller series.

The most surprising thing about this whole case, honestly, is that it went all the way to a jury verdict: The vast majority of cases of this type get dismissed or settled well before a jury is called in to pass judgment. (In fact, the Shyamalan suit was dismissed, but was resurrected on appeal.) The case went so far as to get Shyamalan up on the stand himself, aggressively denying that he or his collaborators had ever seen, or set out to copy, Gregorini’s work, and calling any similarities between the two either coincidences, or simply shared storytelling tropes.

To be fair to the Italian filmmaker, there are some surface similarities between her coming-of-age film and the Shyamalan show, notably a major plot point in which a mother deludes herself into believing a doll is a real baby, a delusion that is then supported by a nanny. The jury, however, doesn’t seem to have been swayed, despite having been shown both the film, and the first three episodes of the series. (Which feels like it must have been a pretty good deal, jury-wise; we bet all those poor schmucks stuck on non-streaming-related murder cases were jealous.) The case has now been running, in one form or another, for fully five years, having been initially filed shortly after Servant‘s 2019 premiere.