BBC Series ‘Babies’ About Pregnancy Loss – starring New Severus Snape Paapa Essiedu – bets on ‘glorious chaos and mess,’ and love: ‘It’s all that matters.’
BBC Series “Babies,” which premiered at Series Mania, shows a loving couple – and its family and friends – dealing with the heartbreak of pregnancy loss.
“I have experienced what’s discussed in the show, but it’s not autobiographical,” creator and director Stefan Golaszewski tells Variety ahead of the festival.
“It just started to feel, to me, like a story I needed to tell – but tell it with hope. The ultimate aim of the show is to connect with people who have been through that, or even just been through loss. Which is kind of everyone, I suppose. I wanted to make them feel less alone.”
In “Babies,” Lisa (Siobhán Cullen, seen in “The Dry” and “Obituary”) and Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) deal with their setbacks differently. He tries to stay positive, no matter what; she’s slowly fading away.
That marks another new show for “Harry Potter” actor Paapa Essiedu, who recently made headlines after admitting he had received death threats over his casting as Severus Snape in the upcoming HBO Max adaptation.
With the help of Cullen and Essiedu, Golaszewski, set out to portray the changes in a relationship going through its first real test.
“With the flashback in Episode 3, for example, I tried to show not just the foundation of their relationship, but also the foundation of their outlooks. The same outlooks that are causing them trouble in the present are the outlooks that attracted them to each other in the past,” he says.
“Lisa goes head first into a rage – Stephen avoids it for as long as he can, until it just becomes unavoidable. These responses to grief are rooted in who they are and how they were brought up.”
The show is produced by Snowed-In Productions, Money Men Studios and All3Media International, with the latter handling sales.
His actors may be on the verge of stardom, but Golaszewski kept things realistic: In “Babies,” people’s flats look lived in and they are constantly worrying about money. He admits he wanted to create an emotional connection with the viewers and to “talk to the audience truthfully about what it’s like to be them.”
“A lot of writing is about ‘un-writing’ in order to achieve a greater sense of throwaway truth about how people speak, what clothes they wear or what their environments are like. People would ask me: ‘What’s the color palette here?’ We don’t usually color-code our lives! Perhaps if Lisa and Stephen were a little older and more middle-class, they might have some interior design aspirations. But they don’t. There’s a kind of glorious chaos and mess that feels like a more truthful representation of the world.”
While the first episodes, which depict their disappointment, are “the bleakest,” happiness comes later.
“You bounce between them first getting together and them in the present day, so you juxtapose the joyful hope of the beginning of love with the first fire they’re stepping through. In one episode, Stephen’s whole positivity thing has just fallen apart. He’s in the pit, and he needs to climb out of it. You see people who have experienced the first terrible thing to happen to them as a couple, and potentially as individuals, and how they have grown because of it.”
So, what does he want to say about love in the show?
“It’s kind of all there is. It’s all that matters.”
“Love is what pulls them through. In some ways, this story is just a romance. You could have a romance where two people fall in love, and he moves to China while she lives in L.A. This is a romance where people keep losing babies, and the certainty and thrill of their youth, which they thought would last forever, has disappeared. They have to work out who they are and how to move forward.”
Golaszewski isn’t shying away from pain, but he wanted to provide a “safe experience” for the audience.
“There’s something about the very nature of creating something that ends up in the audience’s living room, at the heart of their home environment. If I were to present this story in a colder, darker way, I’m not sure what positivity that would bring to people. I want them to feel better about the world after watching it.”
There won’t be another season of “Babies,” however.
“It’s a one-off,” he stresses.
“I’ve done repeat series in the past, but it can affect the purity of the idea, the concept and the journey you wanted to take. With this, I feel like the best version of it is just this one journey. It’s about a couple who have grown from people to whom trauma hadn’t happened to people to whom it had. There’s a coming-of-age element to that journey that feels like it only needs six hours.”
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