‘Baby Fever’ Review: A Tale That Confronts Women With The Pressures Of Modernity
Maternity is one of the most important aspects of human life. Women find themselves in a situation that only they can understand on a deeper level, and yet, they need to share it with basically everybody else in the world, as we are all part of it. Maternity in more recent times has been seen as more of an obstacle than an actual blessing, and yet, millions of women around the world wish they could become mothers, but they can.
Hundreds of thousands of doctors also work every day in the pursuit of helping these women to become mothers. It doesn’t matter if they have husbands, or they are single or if they are lesbians, or whatever. The work of these fertility doctors helps to improve lives all around, which is why it is so strange that they are seldom the main focus of the many shows that follow doctors around. Those shows mostly focus only on surgeons and of course on the emergency room.
Baby Fever is a new Danish Netflix TV series that focuses precisely on that. A fertility doctor finds herself in a terrible situation when she discovers that she only has six months to get pregnant before her body won’t allow her to do it anymore. In order to rectify this, she commits a crime that quickly goes beyond her and starts affecting the lives of others until it becomes unsustainable.
The show stars Josephine Park, Olivia Joof Lewerissa, Simon Sears, and Charlotte Munck. The cast is one of the strongest points of the show, with Park and Lewerissa taking on roles that become really important and form the basic pillar of the show when it comes to the feelings. They both create a relationship on screen that feels natural and one that many people wish they could have in real life, a real friendship.
Park, of course, is the start of the series and the role of Nana takes the actress on a rollercoaster of emotions that is not easy to describe. Nana goes and does about everything you can think of in a matter of only three hours, as the show only runs for about six episodes, with each episode only running for about 30 minutes. It is a very short show, but it packs a punch in terms of the story.
The pacing is fabulous, each new episode brings something new to the table, a new element that will make Nana’s situation even more complicated. It all ends in a very predictable way, but it doesn’t matter because Nana’s situation becomes very relatable. Not the fact that she commits a crime or that she looks to get pregnant. But the fact that we all have wanted something in the past, and we might have done something unethical in order to get it, be it small or big.
Park’s performance really pushes the show forward, and it makes all those predictable plot points feel like they are happening to a real person. Someone that might not be perfect, but also doesn’t deserve all of this mess of her own creation. It is a very interesting and particular situation, and it will depend on each member of the audience to judge Nana or just support her through this gauntlet.
Visually, the show pulls off that visual look that is basically used by every single show from the Scandinavian region. The colors are cold, and the cities look very distant in the background. There is really so little of Copenhagen in this show that it could have been set in any other city in the world, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. There have been movies set in the city that feel a lot warmer, but almost all TV shows choose this as the default look. A change would be very welcome.
Another fascinating aspect of the show is the different sets of couples or even trios that visit Nana to start the fertility treatment. It speaks a lot that all these different families are represented in the show and that their introduction into the situation is done in such an organic way. Some shows try to push representation, but the stories are never constructed for such things, and so the inclusion feels forced. That is not something that happens here with Baby Fever.
Baby Fever is a great drama piece, it never falls into melodrama, and it is very consistent throughout its six episodes. It is the perfect binge-watch for a cold afternoon or a lazy Sunday. The show is definitely following the trend of these short TV series that are basically made like three or four-hour movies, and they are split into episodes. When a movie doesn’t have the time to develop the characters properly, this new short series format has exactly one hour extra to do all the job.
Baby Fever might not be really memorable, but it contains a very satisfying and complete story that tackles a subject that is not often seen on television. The show manages to add a great level of representation in the most organic of ways, and its central performance is one of the best of the year. It doesn’t matter if you like this kind of story or not, Baby Fever has what it takes to be enjoyed by many audiences.
