The name of Andy Wolton’s new Apple TV+ series, “Trying,” reads like a misnomer, because the whole production feels effortless: Charming, easy, light on its feet even in its most somber moments, welded together by wonderful performances from its two leads, Rafe Spall and Esther Smith. But Wolton couldn’t up and name his show “Effortless” because, among many other reasons, there’s nothing effortless about becoming a parent, whether through birth or through adoption.
The former path is where viewers meet Wolton’s protagonists, Jason (Spall) and Nikki (Smith), a dedicated 30-something couple who’ve put in uncalculated hours attempting to conceive; the latter path is the one they end up taking when they fail, yet again, to get pregnant, and the story follows them through the rigors of the adoption process. It’s not often that television series about young people striving toward young parenthood decide to focus on options other than pregnancy; it’s less often that television gets honest about what parenthood actually looks and feels like, regardless of how children are introduced into their parents’ relationship dynamic. “Trying” is frank. Frankness, at least according to Wolton’s writing, is at times caustic, and at others sweet. Appropriately enough, these are the best ways of describing the series writ large.
“Trying” begins smack dab in a middle-aged sex fantasy-cum-nightmare, with Jason and Nikki surreptitiously banging one out at 10:30 on a weeknight while riding the bus, lest they miss a precious window of conception. Now that’s how to set a tone—with three-and-a-half minutes of awkward, exhausted lovemaking on public transportation. The show’s prevailing attitude falls somewhere between Stephen Falk’s “You’re the Worst” and Sam Mendes’ “Away We Go”—Wolton’s goal is balancing acidity with sentimentality, emphasizing that Jason and Nikki, while imperfect people, are mostly good and entirely well-intended. They are, in other words, commonplace. Most of us likely know a Jason and Nikki, and most of us would support our personal Jason and Nikki if they chose to become parents.
The complications that arise when Wolton’s Jason and Nikki make that choice make up the meat of the drama in “Trying.” Wouldn’t you know it: Adopting a kid means jumping through hoops within hoops. It’s a popularity contest, or at least that’s how it feels when you’re going through it, and popularity contests have a way of revealing to people their own inadequacies, whether those inadequacies are significant or utterly normal: A lack of intellectual curiosity and a dearth of cultural refinement, for instance, or, more of a concern, employment that only pays halfway decently. Jason teaches ESL. Nikki works at a car hire. They live in Camden in a tiny flat. They’re in the same line for adoption as financial advisors, cardiologists, political journalists, and educational consultants, and they’re disadvantaged for it.
“We’ve got jobs that people got stuck in,” Nikki wails to Jason in Episode 3 (“Tickets for a Queue”), “not jobs people do.” For biological parents, this isn’t the same roadblock to having kids as it is for our two beset upon heroes, whose vocations are qualifying factors for taking a child into their home. Just wanting to be parents isn’t enough. Having love to give isn’t enough. This is perception, of course, both a systemic perception and Nikki and Jason’s perception (although the systemic perception that they aren’t good enough consequently informs their own perception that they aren’t good enough).
But “Trying” understands the power of perception, and so it naturally follows that Jason and Nikki perceive and react to their circumstances differently. They throw themselves into the process, certainly, and the process leads them both to introspection. But Nikki’s fixated on the future while Jason’s fixated on his past. She buys flush mounts for the ceiling light and stuffed animals; he reconnects with his ex (Cush Jumbo) and persuades her to say nice things about him if the adoption agency contacts her as a character witness. “Trying” forces both characters to reconsider themselves top to bottom, to examine who they were, who they are, and who they could be, which sounds mawkish sans mention of Wolton’s comic sensibility.
Jason and Nikki mean well. “Trying” means for them to change—not on a fundamental level, because the show doesn’t appear interested in arguing that being a parent means sacrificing personality but on a structural level, such that they become more responsible versions of who they are. But meaning well and doing well are two different things, and as much as “Trying” invites audience sympathies for their efforts at betterment, it also invites equal amounts of laughter. Their last-minute scramble to make their apartment look suitably child-friendly for their home visit from adoption agent Penny (Imelda Staunton) in Episode 4 (“Rainbow Castle People”) turns their self-conscious neuroses into endearing comedy; their rush to decorate their place with rocking horses, healthy living cookbooks, and all the trappings of a middle-class sophisticate’s lifestyle, is dryly funny for its naked, casual cynicism.
People have an image of what adoption agencies look for in applicants, and Jason and Nikki don’t think they meet that image. The viewer might not, either: They’re capable of petty jealousy and other unflattering emotions, after all. “Hope he doesn’t grow up to be a prick!” Nikki tells a friend in one of her baser moments in the premiere (simply titled “Nikki and Jason”), stricken by envy and stung by the insensitive flowery declarations of motherhood’s joys made by others. She wants to be a mother so badly. “How can I miss something I’ve never had?” she says to Jason after their latest doctor appointment, seen just moments before, dashes their last hopes for pregnancy. It’s impossible not to feel all the love in the world for her: Smith is so earnest, so vulnerable, that she wins immediate clemency for the many ways in which she’s a fuck up.
That’s the trick, after all. Being a mother or a father is such an enormous obligation that anyone shouldering the role starts out looking like a fuck-up. The sign of a great mother, or a great father, is how they change. “Trying” has an impish sense of humor, but it tops its comedy with a great heart. [B+]