Ilana Glazer delivers in Babes

If you’re looking for a comedy about women’s friendships, you’ve struck the motherlode with Babes. And Ilana Glazer is here to talk about it.

In Babes, yoga instructor Eden (Ilana) is happily single, and the biggest cheerleader for her pregnant, married lifelong BFF, Dawn (Michelle Buteau), who’s a dentist. So after Eden falls pregnant following a brief hookup, she decides to follow in Dawn’s footsteps. She’s there in the trenches with Dawn and her husband Marty (Hasan Minhaj) as they raise their newborn and toddler son. And she’s slowly stripped of all delusions about motherhood and pregnancy as she watches Dawn battle through the exhaustion of postpartum depression, housework, and her career, while trying to meet everyone’s endless demands on her mind and body. But these demands leave Dawn with precious few resources to dedicate to Eden when she needs her bestie most – despite their devoted friendship being as vital to Dawn as her own marriage. 

While Babes is a comedy (promise!) it is also an unusually frank look at how being slightly out of sync with even your dearest friend’s life stages can strain the relationship – and why it’s worth holding on, despite the literal blood, sweat, tears, and everything else that comes out of (and along with) babies. Stream Babes now.

It’s a baby … and a movie!

Ilana Glazer as Eden

Ilana started writing Babes with her long-time writing partner, Josh Rabinowitz, after her agent Susie Fox came up with the idea of a buddy movie about two women in the early phases of motherhood while she was in the shower – in a rare moment of peace from the demands of her own young children. Coincidentally when Susie made her suggestion, both Ilana and Josh had just found out that they were going to be first-time parents (with their own partners).

It made them the perfect stand-ins for Eden while writing. "I would say that Eden is me and Josh," says Ilana. "We were still bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, feeling like people who didn't have that enormous, very acute responsibility. And Dawn is really Susie, who was a couple of years ahead, balancing her amazing, impressive career with having two tiny children under two, who was like, 'Oh, you just wait.' It's so funny that we were on one side of parenting when we started this process, and that we're on the other side of it now, having completed the film and completed having a baby, and making sure they live past year one.”

Who to expect, when you’re expecting

While writing, Josh and Ilana reached out to friends, family, and Susie, to ask them about their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting – to really get down to the grain. Then, script in hand, they turned to Pamela Adlon to direct. "Pamela has been talking about bringing 'old mom' energy to the picture, and she did bring that deep well of experience," says Ilana. 

Ilana also knew just who to bring into the story to play her on-screen BFF… her off-screen BFF, Michelle Bateau, who came up on the standup comedy circuit with her. "I've known Michelle for 20 years. We knew no one on the planet would be able to be that funny and that emotional in the same movie. She's just absolutely effervescent in a way that's just simply true to herself. She is magic," raves Ilana. Pamela was just as thrilled, describing Michelle as, "the deepest well of brilliant ideas and impeccable comic timing."

Michelle Buteau as Dawn

With women’s friendship forming the heart of this film on and off screen, Pamela insists, "It's so true that people outgrow each other, and life changes you. But honestly, it's profound to see women really be there for each other. When I showed my first cut to four of my friends, three of them were in tears.”

Josh, the father, gets the last word on motherhood to balance out the mothers' tears. "There's a line Eden has about life being, 'like a gorgeous newborn baby covered in its mother's s**t,' that life is just this gorgeous, disgusting thing. That aspect was at the core of our decisions with character and comedy. To show that parenthood can be hilarious and disgusting and depraved, but show it in a loving way." 

Stream Babes now, and add these 7 movies and series for your mom friends watchlist.

Quick links

• Bridget Jones’s Baby
• Parallel Mothers
• Big Little Lies
• Big Love Season 1-5
• Tali’s Baby Diary
• Sex and the City Season 1-6 
• Mothers’ Instinct 

1. Bridget Jones’s Baby

After feeling sidelined by her friends who’re all raising their kids, a newly pregnant 43-year-old Bridget (Renée Zellweger) had to secretly work out whether her ex, lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), or her one-night-stand, mathematician Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey), is her babydaddy. 

Bridget’s reunion with Mark happens while they’re attending the christening of her friend Jude's (Shirley Henderson) baby and they’re asked to be godparents. And the moment Bridget suspects she’s pregnant, her besties rally round. The first person she turns to is her long-time friend Shazza (Sally Phillips), while her news anchor friend Miranda (Sarah Solemani) tries to sneak a DNA sample from Jack when he’s a guest on her show, and her gynae Dr Rawlings (Emma Thompson) even holds two separate appointments with Bridget and her potential babydaddies. It’s a typical Bridget Jones debacle and her girl gang is onboard the struggle bus, lifetime tickets firmly in hand.

Also watch: Prequels Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and the sequel, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

2. Parallel Mothers

Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother, Talk To Her and Volver) is fascinated by the relationships between women and the emotionally complex dynamics of motherhood and camaraderie as women raise children together. In the film Parallel Mothers he brings in one of his muses, Penélope Cruz, to tell a story of two mothers – chaotic, generous photographer Janis Martínez (Penélope, who won five major awards for the role) and teen rape victim Ana (Milena Smit) – who give birth together during the Covid pandemic lockdown. The two keep in touch and after Janis uncovers a secret about their babies, she hires Ana to be her daughter’s nanny and the two develop an intense relationship that straddles the line between friendship, sexual love, and a mother-daughter bond.

3. Big Little Lies

In the world of the super-rich, mothers have to deliver a perfect performance at all times. But for the moms who’re expected to be so deeply engaged with their children, it’s a struggle to accept the fact that all consuming motherhood isn’t enough, and to assert their identity as individuals. Big Little Lies’ five alpha moms, Renata (Laura Dern), Celeste (Nicole Kidman) Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz), Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), and Jane (Shailene Woodley), all reach for that goal in their own way. And yes, their children’s schools become battlegrounds when they try to figure out whose child is a bully, and who bit whose kid, and why. But who would know their struggle better than their fellow moms? Motherhood is a sisterhood. And sometimes when you have to push a sister’s abusive husband down the stairs, it’s a sisterhood of secrets. Shhh. 

4. Big Love Season 1-5

This dramedy centres on patriarch Bill Hendricks (Bill Paxton) and his three wives – first wife and non-polygamist Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Barb’s former cancer nurse Nicki (Chloë Sevigny), and babysitter-turned-child-bride Marge (Ginnifer Goodwin) – who’re part of a secret (and illegal) Mormon polygamist sect. 

While Bill comfortably accepts his gender-assigned role as the head of the family who can do as he pleases, the much harder role of keeping sweet, praying and obeying falls to his wives, along with all the labour of raising their seven children. The three Mrs Hendricks are not temperamentally suited to being submissive and setting aside their jealousies, either. Like three cats that Bill has tied together by their tails, Barb, Nicki and Marge often claw at each other, but they love each other and see each other as people in a way that Bill just doesn’t seem capable of. And when all three women feel called to a higher duty than being Bill’s wives, they show their strength as a real family.

5. Tali’s Baby Diary

Instagram sensation, influencer, thought leader Tali Shapiro-Nudelman (Julia Anastasopoulos) is having a baby. She has gathered her wickedly observant documentary film crew to come along for the nine-month journey, and her momfluencer makeover. Say goodbye leopard print, and hello beige and cream everything, as we get ready for a wholesome, “all-natural” Tali. Oh dear! But since Tali’s friend Gabi (Lara Toselli), who stole her thunder by going into labour at the end of Tali’s wedding, is firmly entrenched as a leading Momstagrammer, Tali has her work cut out for her. 

The season focuses on all the changes that expecting moms go through, that somehow never make it onto the movies’ and social media’s pastel, glowing goddess mood board of motherhood. Will Tali find out that the real social media power lies in calling out the lies and getting real? She has 10 episodes to figure it out. But in the meantime, we’ll watch her use her big business brain and connections with other moms to become a momtrepreneur. 

6. Sex and the City Season 1-6 

Sex and the City’s focus on women’s friendships and sex is especially juicy when it spotlights Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixton) and Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis) different choices around motherhood. Charlotte, who desperately wants a baby, has fertility issues. Miranda has a “whoopsy baby”, only to struggle with the reality of motherhood. Carrie has to wrestle with whether she wants to be a mother or she is just responding to a life script that doesn’t work for her. And Samantha is unwaveringly in camp “not for me”, but still shows up for her friends (more or less, much like Carrie) – as willing to blow a party whistle for an abortion as she is to toot the horn for a baby shower. Sex and the City doesn’t sugarcoat how becoming a mother impacts your friendships. And it examines both sides of the hostilities between women with children, and the women who push back at them because they don’t want to be forced to participate.

Also watch: The follow-up series And Just Like That Season 1-2.

7. Mothers’ Instinct 

This psychological thriller set in US suburbia during the 1960s adapts French author Barbara Abel’s 2012 novel of the same name (Derrière la haine). As mothers of sons the same age, next-door neighbours Alice (Jessica Chastain) and Céline (Anne Hathaway) are thoroughly in each other’s business. But when Céline's son Max (Baylen D Bielitz) dies in a fall and Alice and Céline are too late to save him, Céline distances herself from Alice, while seemingly becoming obsessed with Alice’s son Theo (Eamon O'Connell), who, in turn, goes to shocking lengths to keep the two mothers together as friends.