What if babies are monsters?
It’s the kind of thing exhausted parents kid about: parasite babies, vampire babies, babies as leeches, babies that bite. They’re jokes for good reason; the things infants do to human bodies defy description, and some parental feelings are — well — hard.
We’ve taxonomized a few, of course. Postpartum depression is broadly discussed even if it’s imperfectly understood, and whole industries have sprung up to address the anxieties of fathers and mothers (and to profitably spark new ones). But so little has been unpacked, really, especially given this specific moment in history, when humans half-live online. And if the parenting internet can teach us anything, it’s that irony isn’t dead: A generation of overachieving optimizers who burned out is now, having reproduced — and being fully aware of climate change — aiming every bit of the neurotic musculature it developed in youth to the doomed project of raising calm, unvexed, emotionally brilliant children.
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And, being optimizers, they’re convinced that they can do it.
The truly mythic scope of all the hope and damage, ambition, adoration, failure, effort and compromise that goes into parenthood was due for an ambitious, contemporary treatment.
Enter Apple TV Plus’s new series “The Changeling,” based on the 2017 novel by Victor LaValle, which starts off feeling like exactly this: a brilliant, sprawling, multigenerational treatise on fatherhood and motherhood that doubles as a fairy tale with room for the internet — and its trolls.
Starring LaKeith Stanfield and Clark Backo, the show (which premieres Sept. 8) follows Stanfield’s Apollo Kagwa, a quiet rare-books dealer living in Queens. After witnessing the steely benevolence with which Emma (Backo), a librarian, persuades a homeless patron to leave his bags with her for safekeeping, he falls hard for her and pesters her for a date until she finally agrees. This is coded as rather sweet, but because “The Changeling” shows Apollo’s father, Brian (Jared Abrahamson), doing much the same to his mother, Lillian (Alexis Louder), back during the garbage strike in New York, the parallels between these love stories acquire an ominous cast.
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To what end, you might ask. Is the idea that Apollo, despite barely knowing his father, is replicating his mistakes? (What happened to his father, by the way? Is he evil, as suggested by a scene in which a young Apollo dreams his long-lost father shows up at his door masked, blowing smoke? Why did his parents part?) By season’s end, we have answers for some of these basic plot questions but none for the cosmic ones.
What follows will sound like a spoiler but is almost entirely lifted from the official trailer: Emma takes off for Brazil, where she encounters an old crone (Teca Pereira) who tells her to make three wishes and warns her they’ll come true whenever the string she has tied around Emma’s wrist breaks. Emma tells Apollo about this encounter when they reunite, and he — joking that he’s the god Apollo — cuts the string.
They marry, Emma gets pregnant, and Apollo happily totes their adorable baby, Brian, around town while she descends into what seems at first like fairly standard postpartum depression.
The show takes on the poetic morass of feelings parents and children have for each other while oscillating between two challenging registers. One is fine-grained social realism of the sort I associate with Hulu’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” which used multiple perspectives on the same events to capture something sour, nuanced and true about a certain kind of aspirational couple living in New York. The other is fantasy horror.
“The Changeling” is exquisite — riveting, precise, unspeakably devastating — in the former mode. In the latter, it drifts close to disaster, piling up symbols and allusions, references and meta-commentary, until the viewer, lost in a sea of explanations, starts to drown. The result is preachy and baffling in ways reminiscent of Alex Garland’s 2022 film “Men.”
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The horror angle had enormous promise. The show’s title refers to a legendary creature left in the place of a baby that’s been abducted (perhaps by fairies or trolls). The recipes for recognizing one are grim. You might suspect the thing in your care is a changeling if it’s sickly or deformed. Maybe it eats too much or does strange things when alone. In some traditions, the things left behind are said to be fairies. In some traditions, to get your human child back from its captors, you have to make the changeling scream.
That’s rich terrain for a modern-day fable about parenting generally — or for a historically informed allegory about the abduction of Black children in particular. For what counts as a “real” baby. For how perversely a story about parental love could provoke parents to murder their children.
Stanfield and Backo deliver extraordinary performances at the border between the show’s registers, where horror, realism and the internet touch. I do want to be clear about that: “The Changeling” offers some of the most effective horror I’ve ever seen. The show’s casual, grounded, workaday realism augments the nightmare; the contrast between those registers, whenever they meet, is sharp. Totally arresting. But as the protagonists’ quests weaken their connection to that concrete world, the show’s stakes start to scatter, too, as if pulverized by too many competing symbolic operations.
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Here’s an example: I’d assumed the series was about Black fatherhood — as filtered through Black sonhood, to be sure, but with particular and urgent interest in Apollo’s secondhand experience of his partner’s PPD (and other complicated, ugly feelings a mother might feel toward her child). Stanfield delivers a sympathetic, textured and tortured performance along exactly these lines, but at a certain point the show starts treating Emma as a prophet and Apollo as benighted for daring to doubt her. “You don’t see,” Emma says to Apollo, looking hunted and regal and correct. “But you will.”
Alas, we do not.
I’m not sure why. This is an adaptation, and in the novel, we do see — sort of. Basic plot questions get answered. The story resolves. We find out what happened to the baby, and why. Not so here. No fairy tale logic materializes to explain the show’s events. Its early, comparatively skillful handling of information — interlacing storylines from different timelines as well as dreams, legends and nightmares — achieved interesting resonances without sacrificing clarity.
But by the end, the plot is more muddle than magic. Is the villain misogyny? Racism? Hubris? Vanity? The internet? A changeling represents. It can be an allegory for so many things: medieval poverty that necessitated reframing the additional mouth to feed as evil, the parental impulse to disown (or murder) one’s children rather than recognize their defects … but what if a changeling is just a changeling? Fairy tales usually open out, their outsize symbols gesturing toward something bigger, but one gets the impression here that the larger questions are being repackaged and shrunk, subordinated so as to fit (and feed) the legend.
And so, while the series pelts the viewer with grandiloquent “revelations” about matters we didn’t think to wonder about — many delivered via only semi-comprehensible side quests — it withholds the core answers it taught us to expect. We’re treated to a robust account of how underground mole-people built their infrastructure but never learn (for example) what Emma’s third wish was.
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There are so many brilliant ingredients here, so much this show could say — and almost does, in storylines such as the elder Lillian’s (played by Adina Porter) — about parenting and failure and heartbreak. About the lovely monstrousness of children. About paranoia, suspicion and fear. About how you always end up, as a parent, in a fairy tale yourself: rowing a metaphorical boat, hunting for a metaphorical cave, trying to become the kind of person who could raise the kind of child you didn’t get to be.
There are shows you want to love. There are shows you want to hate. And then there are shows that dazzle you early on with their beauty, their mastery, their confidence. And one day — suddenly and without explanation — they seem different. Diminished. Odd. Just a little bit wrong. As if a fairy abducted the perfect thing they were shaping up to be and left something else in their place.
The Changeling (8 episodes) premieres Sept. 8 on Apple TV Plus with three episodes. New episodes will stream weekly.
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