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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trying’ On Apple TV+, A Comedy About A Couple Who Go Through The Adoption Process
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V has made the adoption process look mostly easy. You lose one of your triplets at birth? Just adopt the baby that comes into the hospital on the same day (We’re looking at you, This Is Us!). Your old maid dies and leaves her kids without parents? Just drive into Harlem in a limo and pick them up (That Diff’rent Strokes intro didn’t age well, did it?). But the process is a lot more complicated than that, and it can be an emotional rollercoaster. At the center of a new Apple TV+ comedy is a British couple who are looking to adopt. Read on for more…
TRYING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Shots of the hip Camden neighborhood in London. A couple in their thirties rides the bus home from a night out, lamenting how tired they are at 10:00 at night.
The Gist: Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall) have been trying to have a baby for quite some time with no luck. On that bus, Nikki realizes that her fertility window is closing and she decides that the two of them should have sex right there in their seats. So, in the name of reproduction, the two of them have very public sex.
But they find out from a fertility doctor that the possibility of having a baby, even through IVF, is hopelessly small. If they try it again, they’ll have to pay for the treatment themselves, and that’s prohibitively expensive. “How do we even know she’s a good doctor?” Jason says in desperation. “She’s Asian,” Nikki replies. “We didn’t get the one bad Asian doctor.” Then she laments, “How can I miss something I never had?”
Cut to nine months later. Nikki is holding a baby, but it turns out to be the new child of a friend of her friend Erica (Ophelia Lovibond). Erica and Freddy (Oliver Chris), Nikki and Jason’s couple friends, are about to have their second child. Nikki isn’t exactly in a charitable mood that day; she hopes the guest of honor’s child “doesn’t grow up to be a prick.” When Jason hesitates slightly when she initiates sex, Nikki has a mini-meltdown. When he finds her in their spare bedroom, she tells him she’s ready to consider adoption, something that Jason has been asking her about for months now.
