LET ME TELL YOU A FUCKING STORY
so this is 'man vs baby', a netflix show written by and starring rowan atkinson, a man who is 70 years old and made his first appearance on TV in 1979 and therefore, should fucking know better.
man vs baby is a sequel to the 2022 netflix show man vs bee in which atkinson basically plays a sweeter, talking version of mr bean named trevor bingley who, despite being a normal person in human society with a daughter and, up until the events of the show, a successful career as a 'deluxe house sitter', gets unnaturally annoyed by a bee while on a job and proceeds to spend 9 episodes straight getting into cartoon-levels of idiotic mishaps and visual gags including but not limiting to throwing hammers through priceless paintings, faceplanting dog shit, almost killing that same dog, getting covered in chimney ash like in mary poppins, crashing a car, and building a legitimate bomb just to kill this bee. the natural conclusion of this bad TV show was trevor bingley failing at killing the bee, setting the house on fire, and being sent to jail for three years. which is where he should have stayed, so that we could leave this universe in the dust where it belongs.
but now, oh ho ho no, atkinson has returned with a sequel named, you fucking guessed it, man vs baby, because naturally the only way you can top the events of man vs bee is if you replace the bee with an innocent child WHICH might i add, looking at the levels of animation used for this child's solo scenes of anarchy, must be very closely related to the baby from Twilight. i would also like to take this moment to point out that at no point in this show is the baby referred to by anything except the term 'it', further proving the fact that this child cannot be considered as human by anybody involved with the writing of this show. they saw this being as a prop not a character.
in an incredible show of self restraint they cut the episode number for man vs baby down to 4, which is still too much, especially considering the entire first episode is just the set up for the actual plot. it took them 30 minutes to even ATTEMPT to justify why this series is happening in the first place and it still left more questions than answers.
the premise for this show is trevor bingley, despite having a genuine fucking arrest record for incidents to do with housesitting, is called up last minute to interview for a job looking after a rich-ass exclusive penthouse that is one of multiple holiday homes some international rich family owns, this one being in london. he gets this call while working his last day at a primary school and agrees to attend the interview that evening after he finishes helping with the christmas play and locking up. right off the bat, to prove to the audience that the man they are supposed to be rooting for is indeed a worthless human being, trevor bingley is called into the principal's office where his boss proceeds to delightedly revel in the fact that this is trevor's last day at the school because they've fucking fired him and she's so psyched about being rid of him that she brings out a bottle of wine and cheers him about his own failures in life while trevor sits there and watches her miserably. it is then revealed that for no reason whatsoever the school has called up one of the village people and requested to borrow their infant to put in the manger as jesus for the play because of course a hertfordshire primary school's greatest concern while putting on a christmas play for -according to the audience we see- about seven parents and twenty of their own students, is whether or not the baby jesus is a genuine child that needs genuine care for. trevor bingley, fully functioning adult man who i cannot stress this enough has successfully raised a child himself checks the back step of this school and finds a random baby, alone, unaccompanied, just. left there. by itself. trevor, the incredible specimen of a man that he is does not question this shit whatsoever, takes the baby in, and they proceed with the play without a single person checking up on the child from there on out.
trevor is the last person left in the school and right as he leaves he realises that the baby is still there in the manger. now to prove that i'm being fair in my assessment of trevor bingley as a character and rowan atkinson as a person for creating him, i will say that this is the one moment in the franchise where trevor does what is objectively the normal and right thing to do, as in, he spends the final twenty-five minutes of the first episode calling both the police and social services in an attempt to get this child to the authorities where it needs to be. however, this is the only point i can give in trevor's favour, and sadly for the people who have to watch this TV show and take it in with their genuine human eyes and ears, the first episode ends with Trevor in london, still with the baby, deciding to just take the baby into the interview with him and then call the police later on.
clearly trevor uses up his only instant of adult wisdom too early on in the show because the next thing he does is decide, despite the fact that 'hey, i'm so sorry, he won't be here for long, but there was an emergency and i'm having to look after this kid for a few hours so i'm just going to hold him during the interview' is a completely understandable thing to say in an adult environment, that the next logical course of action is to stuff this baby into a backpack and proceed to do his goddamn best to hide his existence from the lady interviewing him for this house-sitting gig. i can only imagine this was because they realised during the writing stage that if trevor was open and honest about anything going on in his life for any situation ever then there would be a five minute burst without an unamusing bumbling-gag and they felt the need to rectify this by having an interviewer stress how important maturity was for their candidate only for a hidden baby to fart and rowan atkinson to instantly pretend that it was him that farted instead.
anyway despite all of this he gets the job, and even more insane is when trevor asks when he'll hear whether or not he has the job, he is told 'oh you have it, it started fifteen minutes ago' and she then promptly leaves to go abroad for the holidays, leaving trevor alone in this penthouse with the baby and nothing else, because as far as i remember at no point was he told that the interview would also possibly be the start of the job and therefor he didn't take anything but the clothes on his back to london with him. it is also not mentioned when this job ends, although it is possible that that condition was stipulated and i was just distracted by rowan atkinson's character putting the baby in the kitchen bin and closing the lid for safekeeping.
now i can only assume that at this point in the script writing process rowan atkinson and william davies gave up and decided the show a lost cause, because i see no other acceptable reason for how fucking blaringly shit the next plot points of this show are, and what i mean is that nothing trevor does from this point onward makes in the least bit sense and his actions are SO universally uncomprehending that i have to theorise he became a junkie during his post-bee prison sentence and this entire show is happening while the man is off his face.
once rowan atkinson is left alone in this luxury penthouse with this strange baby for an undisclosed amount of time, the baby takes a shit, because of course he does. rowan atkinson's response to this -and again i have to point out he canonically has a daughter, he knows how to care for children- is to start rooting through his incredibly rich clients personal belongings until he finds a drawer of silk handkerchiefs and a collection of plastic pegs which he uses to fashion the baby a new nappy from. he then puts the old one in a ziplock bag and, rather than putting it in the bin, leaves it on the penthouse balcony; something i feel the need to point out he does REPEATEDLY throughout the show, and NEVER FOLLOWS UP ON. he never moves them from the balcony and it is never clarified if the bags are ever dealt with in a normal manner, they're just left on the balcony, which to me is fucking insane. not as insane as the fact that rowan atkinson decided to paper-mache the kid a nappy, but insane nonetheless. i hear what you're saying though, 'papaya maybe trevor bingley, simple man that he fucking is, didn't think he could leave the penthouse' oh no, no no, let me soothe those concerns by telling you the next few things that happen in the show. immediately after committing theft on his clients to improvise a nappy, trevor bingley proceeds to 1: realise the baby is hungry and needs baby food, 2: happily put on his coat and take the baby on a walk to the nearby store to buy Nothing But Baby Food, 3: take the baby back to the penthouse and realise the baby took another shit, and 4: PROCCEED TO STEAL ANOTHER SILK HANDKERCHIEF TO USE AS A NAPPY. i shit you fucking NOT, that is what happens consecutively without a second of hesitation on trevor bingley's part, and the unfathomable nonsense that would have to be going through a person's mind in order to not notice how fucking unnecessary that is as a plot blows my mind more than anything else in this fucking world.
To Make It Fucking Worse you can't even say that he didn't know the shop would also sell nappies, because the next day he runs OUT of silk handkerchiefs and his response to THAT is to go 'oh i should buy some nappies' and then DELIVEROO some to the fucking apartment, an endeavour which, by the way, gets him locked out of the penthouse because he doesn't take the key-fob thing down with him when he picks up the delivery. so the baby is unsupervised for like 45 minutes while rowan atkinson crashes a different family in the building's christmas dinner so he can use their phone-SOMETHING HE DOES WITH NO LEVEL OF POLITENESS BY THE WAY, I'M TALKING THIS MAN, WHO LET ROWAN INTO HIS HOME, PICKS UP A LONG DISTANCE VIDEO CALL FROM HIS DAUGHTER WANTING TO SAY HI FOR CHRISTMAS, AND ROWAN STRAIGHT-FACED NO MERCY SNATCHES THE PHONE AWAY FROM THE FAMILY SO THAT HE CAN MAKE A PHONE CALL. anyway that whole plot point ends with atkinson finally getting back into penthouse just in time for the baby to rocket out of the laundry shute at him like cantelope being shot from a canon, knocking him to the ground. so there's also that and i hate that this show exists.
also another thing to mention is the way this baby is portrayed, because like i said before, this kid is not human, nor is he treated like a human. rowan atkinson despite KNOWING HOW TO CARE FOR BABIES ALLEGEDLY on multiple occasions leaves this child sat on high surfaces unsupervised with no guard rails because this child is a movie prop and therefor apparently cannot get hurt, in fact the closest instance to rowan atkinson's character displaying any knowledge for the act of safeguarding is when he decided to crack the lid of the kitchen bin so the kid could get fresh air rather than leave it shut completely. this child also canonically has the mouth strength of a fucking elephant trunk and a palate fond of antique wine as shown by the first night spent in the penthouse when after not being able to get the baby to sleep, trevor bingley's solution is to open a bottle of wine and let him suckle on the -fermented, presumably- cork instead of a pacifier. it is then a repeated gag throughout the next three episodes that every morning rather than being awoken by an alarm or his natural body clock, trevor bingley is awoken by the baby at the crack of dawn on the dot shooting the cork out of his mouth with the force of tom daily rocketing towards a fucking swimming pool mid-dive to the point where it ricochets off the fucking ceiling and hits a lightbulb like a gong. it's also worth noting that being as this baby appears out of nowhere and at the end of the show STILL has no confirmed origin, this could very well be a non human entity. this baby might be the supernatural manifestation of karma there to make atkinson's character suffer for his past sins, OR it's the bee from man vs bee reincarnated and there to get revenge for the attempted terrorist attack it had to endure. or maybe since i don't think the bee even died in that show, this baby has just been hired by the bee to carry out his ill-will.
that baby then grows up to become vanessa bloome from the bee movie. anyway i fucking hate this show. it's rated PG for 'dangerous behaviour' and 'threat' which fucking go figure, it threatens my well being and makes me consider a LOT of dangerous behaviour for sure.
there's so much more i could talk about in this show, like at one point he kidnaps a dog and allows squatters to raid his clients fridge and then gives the squatters' baby to social services instead of HIS baby, and i just-
just do not watch this show. do not let these people think that this should be allowed to succeed as standards for 'entertainment'. don't let them come back in three years with man vs toddler, or man vs hamster. the only acceptable season 3 i will accept in this universe is man vs rowan atkinson, where atkinson is locked in a cement room with his own creation and forced to fight to the death for forgiveness from the general public.
don't watch the show. it sucks.
the fact that i haven't had time to watch tv since like, september, and when i finally did i chose this one and had to deal with the outcome of that mentally, devastates me more than anything i've ever been through in my life.
