Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 12, 2025
Netflix’s new Rowan Atkinson series Man vs. Baby is four episodes of roughly half an hour each, or two hours total, and there is no way it was not originally conceived as a movie. There is no way it should be a television series. There is also no reason in the world to watch it. It is almost impossible to imagine a bigger waste of time, why anyone would bother making it, or why anyone would click on it.
It is currently ranked second on Netflix, behind the Diddy documentary. So what do I know?
Calling it bad implies it can elicit a negative reaction. It does not deserve a scathing review. Calling it mediocre would likewise be a stretch because it does not rise to that level. It is nothing, and it barely even manages that. It is the streaming equivalent of negative space. The empty area surrounding something that actually matters. Man vs. Baby does not matter. It is tantamount to highway hypnosis — the way we respond automatically and correctly to external events on long car drives without consciously remembering the actions taken or the time passed. I sat down, I turned it on, and while I technically heard and saw everything that happened, it felt like I hit play and woke up two hours later.
Atkinson plays Trevor Bingley, essentially a version of Mr. Bean who talks slightly more often. On the last day before he is let go as a caretaker for a school, a baby is mysteriously left in his care. It is Christmas. He is broke. He is alone because his ex-wife and daughter made other plans, and he needs $10,000 to pay off his daughter’s college tuition. He gets a call to housesit a beautiful penthouse in London that just so happens to pay around $10,000. He spends the weekend trying, and failing, to give the baby to the police or to social services and interacts with a handful of people along the way, all thanks to the baby. By the end, this lonely man hosts a giant Christmas feast in the penthouse with not only his ex and his daughter, but also the people he met over the course of the weekend.
It is a YouTube short stretched across two hours in which almost nothing happens. There are no laughs and no joy to be had, Christmas or otherwise. There is nothing in the series that cannot be gleaned from the 90-second trailer, including the only two attempts at actual jokes. It is pointless. It does not even work as background viewing or a way to pass time because to say as much would be to give it purpose, and it has none. There is nothing here upon which to remark except that it exists, and even that would be hard to prove.
