Rowan Atkinson claims not to care what the critics say about him, said Carol Midgley in The Times. He’d be unmoved, then, to learn that I found his new Netflix series quite “charming”.
A sequel to 2022’s “Man vs Bee”, it’s a “comedic survival drama” in which Atkinson reprises his role as hapless everyman Trevor Bingley. In the run-up to Christmas, Trevor loses his job as a school caretaker in a pretty village. He’s about to close up for the last time when he finds a baby abandoned there, and feels obliged to take it home.
‘Unpleasantly stressful’
Lonely and broke, Trevor is thrown a lifeline when he’s offered a house-sitting job in a London penthouse, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. There’s just one problem: he can’t offload the baby; the police are too busy and social services think he’s delusional. So he brings the infant with him. The baby proceeds to explore the lethal potential of every item in the flat, leading Trevor in a dance to save it. The series amounts to a succession of “nightmarish” scenarios; I found it unfunny and actually “unpleasantly stressful”.
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Silly and ‘trite’
When Trevor went to war with a bee, his no-holds-barred approach to eliminating this nuisance led to some enjoyably farcical scenes, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. Here, he is not, of course, pitted against the baby, so the laughs are thinner on the ground, while sentimentality abounds – as does the product placement. It amounts to four cynical episodes that trade on “Cosy British Christmascore” in a way that is “nauseatingly schmaltzy”, silly and “trite”.