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There are a million things that no one ever tells you about having a newborn, things you unceremoniously find out about when you’re deep, deep in the poop. Netflix’s The Letdown doesn’t hold back when it comes to revealing some of these harsh truths.
When the pilot episode opens, Audrey (played by series co-creator Alison Bell), has been driven (literally) to pay a drug dealer to push her car down the block in the middle of the night so she’s not idling on his turf, in order for her baby to sleep in the car seat. Though most of us have never resorted to paying off a local dealer, if it meant getting a solid night of sleep after weeks of deprivation, well, sleep deprivation has a way of resetting one’s moral compass. Later in the same episode, the show plows full on into the reality of sex after childbirth, by showing Audrey’s discomfort due to her c-section scar and her hemorrhoids (“Don’t SAY it!” she tells her husband when he asks if they’re bothering her during their intimate moment), as well as the leaking breast milk all over Audrey’s tank top while he’s feeling her up. None of my What To Expect books mentioned ANY of this. But, guys, this is what to expect, so get ready, because it will be embarrassing and you might give up at first, and then eventually you’ll be like “screw it, let’s go for it” because this is your new reality. (You will come to the same conclusion when it comes to, say, washing your hands after changing a diaper, or changing your shirt after being spit up on, or deciding it’s okay to poop while your baby is latched on your boob because you can’t hold it in anymore — there’s only so much time in the day for self-consciousness or self-care when it comes to bodily fluids, both yours and your baby’s.)
Tonally, The Letdown feels a little like Amazon’s Catastrophe but, while Catastrophe‘s Rob and Sharon decide to raise their baby together and get married when he accidentally knocks her up after a one night stand, The Letdown follows several parents who had babies on purpose and are still not sure what the hell they got themselves into. Though the show delves into a few B-stories about Audrey’s friends from her moms group, like lesbian single mom Martha, who is debating letting her sperm donor take an actual parenting role, or career-driven Ester, whose husband Ruben wants to be the primary caregiver to their infant daughter, this is Audrey’s story to tell. Anyone who has ever tried the cry it out sleep training method with a baby will understand the madness she’s driven to as she times her husband’s soothing session with her daughter down to the second on a stopwatch, only to hear the reprise of screams the second he tiptoes out of the nursery. Audrey was once a working woman with a great career track and a social life, but her FOMO is getting the better of her so she ends up doing ill-advised things like taking her baby with her to a fancy dinner where she ends up leaving in tears because, well, you can’t really do that with a two-month-old. Sorry, former self, you are long gone, and so are all of your Friday night plans for the foreseeable future.
Letdown, if you don’t know, is the actual release of milk from milk glands into the breasts, and it results in a nice, tingly (though occasionally stinging) feeling that lets you know your baby is ready to eat. That crazy symbiosis between mother and baby is beautiful and wonderful, but the irony of the name wasn’t lost on Bell and her co-creator Sarah Scheller; the wordplay perfectly encapsulates multiple aspects of new parenthood. There are so many modern life-hacks to help us solve the riddle that’s been asked since the dawn of man, (that riddle being “What do I do with this kid now that I’m responsible for keeping him alive?”) but between the baby-rearing books and special noise machines and knock-off luxury strollers Audrey and her fellow parents buy to help them navigate this new world, it turns out babies are Kryptonite and adults are powerless against them, no matter what we do. The Letdown shows the utter exhaustion and confusion we all face the moment the hospital lets us go home. It’s a million different feelings and emotions at once, and they can go from nice and tingly to occasionally stinging in no time.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer obsessed with reality TV, Nashville and Sleepy Hollow. She would rather live in a world with no Muppets than these new Muppets.
