Babies: ‘very special’ miscarriage drama

Stefan Golaszewski specialises in uncomfortably hard-hitting dramas, said Vicky Jessop in The Standard, such as his 2022 series “Marriage”. But “Babies” might be the most “hard-hitting of them all”.

Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen star as Stephen and Lisa, a couple in their mid-30s who are reeling from a miscarriage, and enduring the “endless, draining slog of trying, trying and trying again to conceive”. It’s a “gruelling” watch, but Essiedu and Cullen deliver “fantastic performances” to create what might be one of this year’s “most powerful” TV shows.

“Every moment is here” in this heartbreakingly realistic BBC drama, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. There’s “the realisation that you’re bleeding as you sit at your office desk”, and “the silence of the sonographer before she tells you there is no heartbeat”. But eight episodes is just “too many”, and the long stretches where Lisa and Stephen “wordlessly watch TV”, or have an “interminable conversation about poached eggs, will sap your will”. There’s also a secondary storyline – about Stephen’s best friend Dave (Jack Bannon) and his girlfriend Amanda (Charlotte Riley) – which is “truly, bafflingly terrible”.

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I had a few quibbles, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. Some themes, such as toxic masculinity, are “overplayed”, and it’s best to ignore the “busker- ish theme tune” (performed by Golaszewski himself). But overall, this is “a very special” series – “unsettling, compassionate, funny, moving, wildly unpredictable and beautifully acted”.