Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Nest’ On Acorn TV, Where A Couple Employs A Troubled Teen As A Surrogate, With Predictable Problems

Written by Nicole Taylor, The Nest was one of BBC One’s highest-rated dramas of the year when it aired in the UK in the spring, and it’s not hard to see why. The five-part limited series promises to have lots of twists and turns, and it involves a story anyone trying to have kids later in life can relate to. But does the show earn its twists and turns?

THE NEST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Nighttime scenes of Glasgow, then we see a woman driving in the city, looking for a street.

The Gist: Emily and Dan Docherty (Sophie Rundle, Martin Compston) seemingly have it all; he’s a very successful businessman, and she’s a music instructor. They live in a beautiful waterfront house outside Glasgow. But one thing has eluded the couple for the length of their marriage: the ability to have children.

They’ve tried everything, fertility treatments, IVF, surrogates. Dan won’t adopt because he doesn’t want the baggage that kids in the UK foster system come with. But things seem to be shaping up; they’re thinking about baby names as Emily looks for a recital she’s supposed to go to. When she turns into a parking lot to get her bearings, though, a young woman runs into the front of Emily’s Land Rover and gets knocked down.

The girl’s name is Kaya (Mirren Mack), and the 18-year-old was so angry with an older guy James (James Harkness), that she threatened him with a broken bottle. Emily offers to take her to get her injured knee checked out, and while driving, Kaya seizes and opportunity and takes a business card Emily had in the ID slot on her briefcase. She begs off the hospital visit and goes back to her apartment, where James, her social worker, is waiting. He brings things for her apartment like a toaster, which she hurls off the roof after he leaves.

The next day, Kaya shows up at the music school where Emily works, he knee in even worse shape. When Emily drops Kaya off at the hospital, she tells the girl to go see her sister-in-law Hillary (Fiona Bell). While Hillary is checking out Kaya, though, she starts bleeding out. When Kaya sees Emily and Dan running into the ER later on, she follows them and finds out that Hillary was carrying the Dochertys’ child and she just suffered a miscarriage.

Kaya gets an idea, and she tells Doddy (Paul Brannigan), a neighbor that seems to take a liking to her, that she’s an “entrepreneur.” She seeks out Emily again and has a proposal: She should be a surrogate for them. The Dochertys are down to their last embryo, which is fueling Emily’s desperation. She agrees to hear Kaya out, and Kaya thinks doing this will change both their lives, as it’ll be the first time someone was grateful to her.

Emily’s convinced, but still needs to convince Dan. Dan is rightfully skeptical, and tries to pay off Kaya to go away, which Doddy happens to witness. Emily and Dan meet Kaya for dinner, and what Kaya’s proposal is that, even though they can’t pay her a flat-out fee for being a surrogate, which is illegal in the UK, Dan can invest £50,000 in whatever new business she creates. He scoffs at the notion, but at a certain point he realizes how distraught Emily is over the child situation. He even gets to the point where he gets his attorney Souter (David Hayman) to investigate.

But when the fertility clinic tells the couple that Kaya is too young to make this decision properly and that they should wait a year, Dan is relieved. But Emily still wants Kaya in their life. This leads the couple to make a decision that’s going to flummox both James and Dan’s sister Hillary.

Our Take: The twists and turns of The Nest‘s first episode are set up by a lot of seeming coincidences and what the therapist that talked to Kaya and the Dochertys about this arrangement called “a lot of magical thinking.” Kaya couldn’t have known that Emily’s Land Rover was going to wind its way into the parking lot of her building as she was confronting James. But it does feel like she was maybe waiting to find a wealthy benefactor in one way or another. Once she saw Emily’s conveniently-placed business card, though, her plan was starting to hatch in her brain.

That’s when the coincidences really started to happen. Emily suggests that Kaya see Hillary, Hillary happens to miscarry while examining Kaya, Kaya happens to see the Dochertys run into the ER, and then she magically convinced Emily that this arrangement can work. The fact that Dan was so vehemently opposed to this felt like the most “normal” part of this entire first episode. He’s right; who the hell is this girl and why is she willing to carry their embryo at such a young age?

But Mack’s performance as Kaya even started convincing us that she has good intentions under her very business-minded exterior. She’s been in the system for years, her mother having died when she was young, and she still thinks people underestimate her, even though she’s now technically an adult. Instead of college or going the way everyone thinks she should go, Kaya thinks that she’s found a way to a career and financial independence. So what if it means she’s renting out her womb? So that’s an issue that will be interesting to explore.

Another intriguing aspect of this series is that it may not just be that Emily and Dan become victims to some sort of con. Kaya may indeed want to carry their child, even if it’s just to have someone in her life doting on her for nine months. But we know something about Dan is shady; he did jail time when he was young and he said he cleaned up his act, but he’s also got a lot of power and influence in Glasgow, and he’ll do anything to make Emily happy.

All of these twists that were set in motion by this first episode are interesting enough to forgive all the coincidences that set things in motion. We just wish Taylor would have gotten there a bit more organically.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: As we see Dan, Emily and Kaya in a Russian fertility clinic, with Kaya getting inseminated with the couple’s last embryo, we see Doddy sinking to the bottom of a river, probably already dead.

Sleeper Star: Fiona Bell will play a big part in this series, as it seems that Hillary has a very close relationship with her brother Dan. But even though she’s the voice of reason in this scenario, it seems that Emily will hold more sway on Dan, at least at first.

Most Pilot-y Line: Doddy seemed to only be there as an impediment, and a minor one at that. But his death will likely come back to haunt Kaya and the Dochertys soon enough.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Nest is twisty enough to keep our interest, but we just wish the first episode didn’t have so many eye-rolling coincidences.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream The Nest On Acorn TV