The five-part Nigerian thriller “Baby Farm,” on Netflix (in English and Nigerian Pidgin, with subtitles), follows a desperate young woman trapped in a sadistic maternity-care facility. Adanna (Onyinye Odokoro) finds herself pregnant, alone and broke in Lagos when a seemingly friendly sex worker ushers her into the welcoming arms of the Evans Foundation, a glam nongovernmental organization that claims to help women like her. Once there, the blond, British Sister Barb (Jenny Stead) really lays on the high-pressure sales tactics.
Even though Adanna is uncomfortable, she agrees to move in. She is worried that living outside might damage her gestating baby, and she has nowhere else to turn. She can leave if she wants to, right? “Leave where, exactly?” replies Sister Barb.
Adanna’s relief to have food and medical care is short-lived. She isn’t in a comfortable place for women to receive prenatal care; she is in a terrifying, abusive prison, run by Barb and her cartoonishly evil husband (Langley Kirkwood), the doctor and face of the organization. “You are here for one thing and one thing only: making babies,” he bellows. Once delivered, the babies are ripped from their mothers’ arms and sold to wealthy couples.
The third prong here is Cherise (Rita Dominic), a Nigerian actress poised for a big break and international success. She and her husband are trying everything they can to have a baby, but nothing has worked. She regrets speaking so openly with the press about her miscarriages because now gossip bloggers hound her about it. Legal paths to adoption are off the table because of her husband’s arrest record, and her desperation and despair are so profound that she is willing to turn a blind eye to some of the sketchiness surrounding the Evans Foundation. She wants a baby through any means necessary.
“Baby Farm” feels like a less-turgid “Handmaid’s Tale,” faster and soapier. The show moves between gutting, grounded moments and campy melodrama, which tempers the misery substantially. The topics at hand here are among the heaviest imaginable, and while this show is not based on a true story, Nigerian “baby factories” are real. But “Baby Farm” manages not to be a didactic, punishing slog. It is energetic, and even as its characters consider themselves utterly stuck, the story really moves.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter.
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