Meaghan Rath, second from the left, and Aaron Abrams, right, play Astrid and James Berney in the CTV series Children Ruin Everything.CTV
As we all know from just an hour watching TV, monsters come in all forms. Me, I think everybody on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette is a monster. Watch the news, and you know the political landscape is filled with both real and cartoon monsters, telling lies and chuntering about themselves.
Watch Children Ruin Everything (starts Wednesday, CTV, 8 p.m.) and you will find two children who are outright monsters. No, seriously, they are. The devil’s spawn. Satan called the producers and said he wants his little minions back.
The new eight-episode Canadian comedy series stars Meaghan Rath and Aaron Abrams as Astrid and James. They are parents to Felix (Logan Nicholson), aged 7, I think, and Viv (Mikayla SwamiNathan), aged 4, I think. Frankly, I didn’t think too deeply about their ages because they are terrifying brats.
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Now, as a setup for a comedy, this is wobbly, but it works somewhat in a cautionary-tale kind of way. Astrid and James are fairly ordinary middle-class people. He toils at some agency that promotes corporations such as grocery-store chains. Astrid is a stay-at-home mom who was a data analyst. As we meet the couple, while they stumble over kids’ toys and try to calm their wailing, fighting, anarchic offspring, Astrid is thinking about returning to work and her old job.
Thing is, every time she sees a baby, anybody’s baby, she swoons and the soundtrack swells with I Only Have Eyes for You. Uh oh.
Meanwhile at work, James must deal with his boss, Marla (Lisa Codrington, familiar as Gail on Letterkenny), who is so abrupt and business-like that she is enthusiastic about COVID-19 because it helps her grocery-store clients make bigger profits. “I could kiss COVID,” she says in what is the funniest bit in the opening episode. Before the episode ends, mind you, someone is saying, “Let’s have another baby!” and “Our family’s not totally complete.” Where’s the fun in that?
What ensues in the second episode emphasizes the continuing ruination that children wreak. Specifically on Astrid’s body. You know, her urethra and such. Some viewers may find that too much information is being relayed. Also, a grocery-chain mogul finds one of the kids to be charming, which is undoubtedly the least plausible aspect of the show. That episode ends with a voice-over about kids being a handful and a responsibility, but being a parent is worth it.
Logan Nicholson, left and Mikayla Swaminathan play Felix and Vivian Berney, the two aforementioned offspring of Astrid and James. Children Ruin Everything follows two parents as they raise their two young children in the city and struggle to hold on to their pre-kid life.Courtesy of CTV
There is a good comedy trying to break out of Children Ruin Everything. Rath and Abrams are good and have excellent chemistry. Nazneen Contractor also stars as Astrid’s la-di-da sister Dawn, and Dawn has a boyfriend who knits, I think. There is also Astrid’s mom (Veena Sood), who has a few feminist things to say about everything. And Codrington is as good at being ruthless as Marla, as she is at being bawdy on Letterkenny. There is some sport with on-screen graphics and the series is emphatically set in Toronto, with a good feel for the locale.
It’s just that there’s too much of everything. Created by Kurt Smeaton (who wrote episodes of Schitt’s Creek and Kim’s Convenience) and from the production company behind Letterkenny, the show is overstuffed with permanent-tantrum kids and material about how wearying kids can be. Example of overdoing it: Astrid’s voice-over saying, “My body used to be a temple, now it’s a jungle gym.” Yeah, we know.
At the same time, the elements of wacky satire are underused. Dawn is a great creation, a corporate monster who works in Human Resources and says things like, “He’s the fitness trainer I offer in all my severance packages.” But there isn’t enough Dawn. There is too much of the kids, whose outrageous behaviour is more wearying on the viewer than on the parents.
The series (which will stream in the United States on the expanding Roku Channel) presents the kids not as often cute rascals who sometimes inhibit their parents’ lives, but as murderous hobgoblins who can terrify you into submission. If the kids on the show are kids today, we are so doomed. The climate crisis and COVID-19 have nothing on these monsters.
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