✍🏻 Amazon's New Show MAMMALS and What We Need to Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Miscarriages
As you settle into the holidays and decide on your next TV show to binge, I would like to provide you with the trigger warning that I was not: do not watch MAMMALS if you are triggered by a dismissive representation of the emotional experience of a miscarriage. Also, if you’re going to keep reading, pretty much nothing but spoilers from here on out…
I was so surprised and delighted mere minutes into MAMMALS when we learn that a miscarriage is to be a driving force of the show’s plot. “Omg,” I thought, “finally, a show that is going to dramatize this particularly devastating flavor of grief. Hello, representation matters! Goodbye, miscarriage taboo! But by the end of the pilot episode it becomes clear that the dramatically rich territory of grief will be trumped by a more traditional plotline and character, that of an ego-wounded man in an emotional tailspin after learning he has been cheated on.
Womp womp.
The show kicks off with a pregnant couple — British Jamie (James Corden) and French Amandine (Melia Kreiling) — setting off on a romantic anniversary getaway. They are happy and horny for each other. Once this dynamic is established, it quickly turns, and Amandine cradles her baby bump — feels a pain. The next morning, she says she’s bleeding, and we cut to a hospital scene where she is whisked away into the ER, and he is told he can’t come in.
We come to learn Amandine is okay, but the baby didn’t make it. Jamie is then tasked with alerting their friends about the loss. He takes Amandine’s phone to reach out to her contacts and is blindsided by an incoming sext from a man named Paul. He reviews their text thread which makes plain that she has been having an affair. Thus begins the erasure of the miscarriage.
The co-creator and writer of the show is a man named Jez Butterworth, a decorated British playwright and screenwriter/script polisher of recent James Bond movies. Jez said he was inspired by a true story — a friend of his learned his wife was cheating when he had her phone after she miscarried and was witness to an incoming sext from another man. I can see why he was excited about this dynamic as an inciting incident for a drama — it’s messy, complicated, nobody is happy, seems like there’s no path to recovery — a perfect dramatic canvas to get into the mess of being a human being.
In an Esquire interview, Jez says he wanted to create a show that grapples with monogamy. After watching the entire season I’d argue the show is about male ego and insensitivity, which is very different from widely exploring monogamy. To tease out monogamy as a screenwriter, you must not withhold the emotional truths of each character from the audience.
In MAMMALS, he’s written scenes between the husband and wife where she’s rarely asked much of anything, and she rarely asserts any point of view other than wanting to hang out with her hot violin teacher (more on that to come). Her character does the asking of Jamie and Jamie does all the talking. He has content, she just goes along with it, and his selfishness is treated as unremarkable, acceptable.
In the pilot, as Amandine’s fate and the fate of their unborn baby hangs in the balance, Jamie leaves the hospital and retreats to their holiday cottage. This did not track for me and was foreshadowing of my coming frustration with the show’s insensitive dramatic choices. The show isn’t even set during the COVID-19 pandemic — when folks couldn’t hang out in medical facilities — and he goes home? Really? He doesn’t stay to be there in case things get worse or hopefully better? Instead, we see him sitting on the coast — where he has no cell reception and thus can’t be reached by his wife or the hospital — gazing out at the sunset, drinking a cocktail. We know nothing of what’s going on with Amandine.
Jamie returns to her hospital room the next morning where they briefly acknowledge the baby’s passing. “Well, at least he won’t hate us now,” which is a call back to their wondering about the kid the night before and how much he’ll love and hate them as parents. That’s all we get about the loss and then — weak in her hospital bed — she says, “What did you do last night?”
My cortisol spiked at this moment. She’s been through physical hell and mental torture, passing their dead child through her body and she’s all, “so, what did you do last night?!” It gets worse. He then waxes philosophical about how he went into some deep internet rabbit holes and now knows everything there is to learn about whales and Tom Jones. You know what he didn’t search: “What causes a late-stage miscarriage?” “How do you survive a late-stage miscarriage?” “Will my wife be okay?” The person IN the hospital bed is supposed to get the monologue in that scene. We seem to have learned nothing from the emotional impact of all those cancer movies we get every Oscar season. The “sick” person is the person with the wisdom, not the one who got to go home and google Tom Jones.
But there is no sympathy for — let alone acknowledgment of — Amandine and what she’s just been through. It just gets worse once Jamie is alerted to her sexual affairs (plural). Instead of confronting her, we see their life go on (as if dead baby grief doesn’t exist) and she is portrayed as a sexualized flirt for the rest of the show. We get none of Amandine’s interior life, we just see her as Jamie witnesses her — his humiliator. The show indulges in scenes where she’s coquettish and engages in what is, to Jamie, a punishing flirtation with her new violin teacher.
Jamie enlists his brother in law to help crack her mobile and find out all the gory details of everyone she’s been with. He is inexplicably helpless to confront her directly. I don’t understand why, except that it allows the show to continue in this vein: a man with legitimate feelings has concerns that he could (but doesn’t) express, and so everyone else must suffer his emotional fallout.
I have never been a fan of the dramatic device of building tension by drawing out a lingering mystery or emotional conundrum that could be easily solved with a quick question and an equally quick answer. It’s tedious and it’s insulting to the sophistication of today’s viewer who is patiently waiting for the next story beat for way too long. In MAMMALS, the next story beat comes four episodes later at the end of the first season when we learn that long ago, before she started cheating, she, wait for it… CAUGHT HIM CHEATING first and we are shown her video proof.
This end of season reveal angered me the most because it was such a missed opportunity for us to see Jamie’s character contemplate (privately or not) his infidelity and wrestle with his own conscience throughout the season. It’s not fair to the viewer to indulge in Jamie’s every pain but then be spared this essential detail — he knows he’s a cheater, why don’t we?
So, what is it, show? Are you asking us to really dig into monogamy or do you just want us to feel sorry for the man and demonize sexy ladies? The way the show constructs POV from just Jamie’s experience manipulates you to be on Jamie’s side, so when we learn that he’s been unfaithful all along, it falls flat.
I'm so mad that a miscarriage was used as a plot device to bolster and legitimize a man's rage that he can't grieve normally because he doesn't know if the dead baby was his. A legitimate concern, and a concern of legitimacy for sure, but why doesn't he just ask his wife instead of taking us on a five-episode journey to figure out what he could have in a five second long question, “why did you cheat on me?” She could have said, “Well, you cheated first.” And then we’d be off to the races to explore attitudes, biases and paths forward from there.
Miscarriages and female infidelity are both about women’s bodies, women’s experiences and women have feelings and ideas and opinions about these things. If you’re going to invoke the topics of late stage miscarriage and the perceived threats of of a sexualized and unfaithful woman, I’d recommend giving voice to the women characters in said script. As I experienced this show, it didn’t challenge or dig in or discuss these themes sufficiently. The show wants to be edgy, whimsical and insightful, but it just felt flip and silencing to me.
Supporters of the show will say, “Liz, MAMMALS is about way more than just miscarriages, it’s about monogamy, maybe YOU should take off your miscarriage filter and not force one where there doesn’t have to be one, not everything has to be about miscarriages and brought to you by Big Grief.” Well, I know that, but let me just say this show reaffirms the culture’s attitude toward miscarriage — no curiosity, no acknowledgement of the depth and validity of the loss that remains a taboo topic. And when there’s no curiosity about or acknowledgement of someone’s pain, then we close the door on understanding the human experience — ours and other people’s.
The show never names pregnancy loss at all, never once is the word miscarriage said or invoked, nor is it dramatically employed as an inevitable filter that would cast darker shadows onto the lives of these characters. As for Amandine, I couldn’t tell you how she feels about the miscarriage, we’re denied that portal. Instead, the miscarriage is merely passing context, a stand in for “intense” and to raise our sympathy for the allegedly cuckolded Jamie, who now doesn’t even know if this dead baby was his.
Back off, Liz, you might say, that’s a warranted concern — what if the baby wasn’t his? Doesn’t that mean that he’d be even more conflicted in his grief? Yes, I’d say, yes, you are correct. To which I’d then say to the producers: well, then dramatize that grief in all its complicated nuance. Please! From the minute Jamie learns of her infidelity, Amandine’s character is steely with him and pathologically flirtatious with other men. Beyond that, there’s just very little performed here other than Jamie in a frenzy about his first restaurant that’s about to open (his baby, you might say, his baby gets born) and trying to get the bottom of the mystery — not what caused the miscarriage — but who all has my wife fucked. That’s right, Jamie is a chef — today’s TV stand-in for a difficult, though lovable, creative genius. And Amandine is a stand-in for today’s ideal woman — sexy, French, and works in marketing.
I guarantee you that every single person who goes through a miscarriage, particularly this more unexpected, later-in-pregnancy type of miscarriage, wants to know why it happened, what caused it, was it my fault? People live with these questions and answers, or lack thereof, for weeks, months, years — it’s all you can think about why — why — why? It’s all anyone else wants to ask you, too. And then there’s the magical thinking of grief, unable to accept it, obsessed with it, will the baby come back, unable to sleep, confused, it’s all a bad dream. But in this show, the loss is immediately accepted. It’s accepted and dismissed the very instant the show becomes about a husband married to a hot, French nympho. Yes, there are a few scenes scattered through where the couple sees a grief counselor, but those scenes are anemic and dominated by the husband’s subtextual rage at the wife for cheating.
At one point the grief counselor asks them to provide three words about their grief. First, Jamie rattles off a dozen words and then Amandine answers, “No words.” That was like a sucker punch to me. Such lazy screenwriting and it feels punishing to me as a woman, like the writer won’t even allow his character to express herself. I would have preferred bad writing and trite sentiment over “nothing.” Jeez, Jez. I’m so disappointed because at the end of six episodes we learn nothing about the emotional experience of what set us on this journey in the first place — of experiencing and surviving natal loss as a mother, father, couple, friend or extended family. I just felt punished for being forced to sympathize with a cheating, hypocrite. And as a woman who experienced many miscarriages, I felt erased, unseen, and once again, mysteriously unworthy of a point of view.
As mentioned, Butterworth writes James Bond movies, he’s good at that. When you sign up to watch a James Bond flick you know what you’re signing up for, you’re signing up to see women represented as the means to an end — a one night stand for pleasure, perhaps with a side dish of state secrets. Either way we never learn what she thinks or feels about the experience, we don’t even think to ask.