It’s fine, I didn’t need my tear ducts anyway.
Stefan Golaszewski has spent much of his career making hard-hitting, uncomfortably relatable dramas – just see his 2022 show Marriage, featuring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker as a troubled, ageing couple – but Babies might be the most hard-hitting of them all.
In it, Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen star as Stephen and Lisa, a couple in their mid-thirties. Their relationship is a beautiful study in tiny details – the pair have electric chemistry, and their time-worn banter feels both real and gorgeously affectionate – but they’re also being tested like never before.
We first meet the pair on a visit to Stephen’s family. His sister has just had a baby, and as it’s passed around, Lisa takes one look and runs outside, crying. As we find out, she’s been trying – and failing – to conceive for what appears to be some time now, and is just recovering from a failed pregnancy.
There’s less of the bitterness of Marriage in Babies, but there is the same sense of baked-in weariness. Much of Babies concerns itself with the endless, draining slog of trying, trying and trying again to conceive – the waiting, the fear, the hope, the devastation. There’s no sugar-coating here. In one scene, we see the couple told that the baby they’ve been desperately waiting for has died in the womb; Lisa’s eyes go dead in a way that is difficult to see.
It’s emotionally gruelling, and the pace is slow. Golaszewski spends a lot of his time filling out the details of Lisa and Stephen’s lives rather than shovelling in loads of plot – and while this does end up dragging slightly over the 6-episode runtime, it does also mean we get to see what fantastic performances Cullen and Essiedu put in.
Their characters complement each other well. On the one hand, Stephen is a person who prefers to make a joke to avoid painful discussions. On the other, Cullen is formidable as Lisa, whose anguish is writ large on every sinew of her body and decision she makes: shouting at Stephen, storming out on her in-laws and lying catatonic in bed.
The pair’s journeys are also thrown into stark relief by the other narrative strand here – that of Amanda (Charlotte Riley) and Stephen’s mate Dave (Jack Bannon, both doing good work with tricky characters). They’re having what can best be described as a fling, and seem wildly incompatible. Dave wants a relationship; Amanda wants somebody to fulfil her sexual needs.
As the episodes crawl by, the show peels back the layers from all of their characters – not only diving into Lisa’s grief, but Stephen and Dave’s ability to address their feelings, open up emotionally or even to support each other when the going gets tough.
The moments of catharsis, which explode outwards towards the end of the series, feel all the more powerful as a result; we’ve spent time with these characters.
Though the show stumbles in the final two episodes with a plot decision that frankly doesn’t really work, the excellent performances, leavened with flashes of wit and warmth, help see it through. Babies isn’t an easy watch, but it might be one of the most powerful pieces of television you’ll see this year.
