HBO's The Baby is more than a one-joke story thanks to the empathy it has for people at every point on the parenting spectrum

Vanity Fair

"What starts as a surreal, frequently gory comedy evolves, over the six episodes made available for advance screening, into something closer to elevated horror'' in the Hereditary mold," says Tara Ariano of the horror comedy co-created by Lucy Gaymer and Sian Robins-Grace. "But the change in tone doesn’t make the story any less compelling..." Ariano adds: "In recent years, shows like The Letdown, Better Things, and Catastrophe, among others, have bravely countered the conventional wisdom that parenting will come naturally to anyone who just wants it enough—and that there’s something wrong with those who don’t want it. The Baby goes to absurd extremes to dramatize how horrible parenting can be for those who don’t go into it with clear intentions… and how it also kind of sucks, sometimes, even for those who do."

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• The Baby feels prescient: "By being able to use their platform to tell a story about the implications of unplanned pregnancy and unwanted motherhood on both sides, creators Robins-Grace and Gaymer are making more than just a feminist statement about the burdons put upon parents (moms)," says Whitney Friedlander. "They have also found a smart way to look at the discussions of generational trauma that we’ve also seen on shows like Netflix’s Russian Doll and Prime Video’s Transparent. How will our children feel when they reach adulthood and find Mommy’s essay about how exhausted she was raising them? Will they spend time in a therapist’s office to understand where parental outbursts and general crankiness came from during these formative years of their lives? Will they absolve their parents for these sins? Those are questions that make this show particularly prescient."
• The Baby is billed as a horror-comedy, but there's very little humor: "The tone is more dour than sardonic, despite Natasha's frequent snide remarks," says Josh Bell. "The Baby is also so rarely scary that it's hard to tell what tone the creators are aiming for. The result is a show that seems reluctant to embrace its own genre and instead falls back on serious social realism as if that's the only justification for the occasional offscreen kill. There's no villain here, really, other than the general concept of misogyny, giving the characters little to focus their efforts against."
• The Baby has big Russian Doll energy: "The viewer is just as in the dark as to the rules of the realm as the puzzled protagonist who finds herself at the mercy of some truly disturbing forces," says Aisha Harris. "(Also similar to Russian Doll: an absurdist, macabre sensibility that will either be 'for you,' or not. I happen to like it myself.) The first several episodes kept me on my toes, as I tried to decipher where the story might be heading, what it might be trying to say about motherhood, adulthood, and mortality. It's best, I think, to go in knowing as little as possible – the better to enjoy and be bewildered by the mystery of it all."
• The Baby avoids parody: With its absurdity, there is "definitely a Saturday Night Live sketch in the premise of The Baby, much like there was in the much-memed, little seen series like The Slap before it," says LaToya Ferguson. "But the way the show is put together, from the performances to the score to the direction — which especially works overtime on both sides of the horror-comedy coin — allows for it to work as an effective piece of storytelling instead of a parody. There’s also genuinely enough gnarly violence (without being too gory) to remind the audience that the stakes of all of this are very real, no matter how many sweet cooing sounds the baby makes or how humorous it is to see Natasha attempt to interrogate a baby that’s sitting in the middle of a couch that is far too big for it. (It’s very humorous.) The comedy of the series is the kind that comes out of an uncomfortable or high-stress situation, usually when you’re the only person who realizes that it is an uncomfortable or high-stress situation."
• One of The Baby's pleasures is not knowing how much digital effects are used on the baby: "A clever, low-key horror comedy that (at its best) matches a helter-skelter rhythm with pinpoint satire, it is also an exploration of the wages of motherhood, or in this case, unmotherhood: the burden of not wanting a baby when no one around you believes it’s possible to not want a baby," says Mike Hale. "That can lead to a lot of anxiety dreams and projection. Still, it’s probably the baby who’s killing everyone."