Man vs Baby

The Gravity of a Rubber Face

I’ve been looking at Rowan Atkinson’s face for most of my life. It’s an instrument all by itself, capable of flicking from panic to smugness to total bewilderment in a second. In his best work—whether he was scheming as Blackadder or wreaking havoc as Mr. Bean—that face had bite. He didn’t just wander into disasters; he caused them through selfishness, pettiness, or sheer antisocial nerve. That was where the comedy lived. Watching him in *Man vs Baby*, Netflix’s four-part holiday follow-up to 2022's *Man vs Bee*, I kept circling one slightly sad conclusion: the rubber face still stretches, but the malice that used to sharpen it has faded, and the jokes drift off with it.



Atkinson is back as Trevor Bingley, a basically decent man whose main gift is catastrophic incompetence. Trevor loses his job as a primary school caretaker right before Christmas and takes a lucrative housesitting job in a sterile, absurdly expensive London penthouse. (He needs the £10,000 for his daughter’s tuition, because modern streaming comedy apparently requires a tidy little sympathetic motivation.) Through a string of increasingly contrived events involving a stray nativity-play extra, he winds up stuck in that high-tech palace with a baby. It’s a good farce setup on paper: luxury architecture meets the unstoppable bodily chaos of an infant.

But the show never gets much louder than a mild, drowsy hum. Atkinson isn’t exactly the problem; at seventy, he’s still impressively elastic. Watch how he angles his torso and arms when improvising a diaper out of expensive household fabric—he still approaches a prop as if it’s a puzzle begging to be dismantled. The real issue is the digital co-star. In several of the more demanding bits, the baby is plainly CGI, drifting through the frame with that weightless, frictionless unreality that instantly punctures the gag. Great physical comedy needs physical resistance. You can’t build slapstick chemistry with something that doesn’t quite seem to exist.



More than anything, this feels like a 90-minute feature chopped into four episodes because the platform needed it that way. (Honestly, that’s probably exactly what happened.) Instead of the escalating, slightly mean destruction that gave *Man vs Bee* at least a little edge, we get a steady drizzle of Christmas sentiment. As *The Guardian* noted, the show never aims for "the grand, high-wire, socially subversive physical comedy we expect from Atkinson," settling instead for a "nonsensical dose of Christmas cheer." Trevor stops being a tiny agent of chaos and becomes a lonely guy throwing a dinner party for the assortment of strangers he meets while trying to hand the baby over to social services.

Dustin Rowles at *Pajiba* described watching the series as "tantamount to highway hypnosis," and that feels exactly right. I sat there, took in the colors, registered the snowy London streets, and occasionally smiled when Atkinson twisted his mouth into an old familiar grimace. But almost none of it stayed with me.



I’m still not sure who this is aimed at. Maybe it’s ideal as low-volume accompaniment while someone wraps presents. There’s nothing wrong with harmless seasonal background noise, but it feels like an awfully small use for one of the great physical comedians still working. Trevor learns to care for the child, the penthouse mostly survives, the Christmas tree glows right on schedule. It all passes by pleasantly enough. But I miss the version of Atkinson who would have taken the baby’s rattle, hurled it out the window, and dead-bolted the door.