Bump: Season 1
A new dramedy streaming on Stan, co-created by Claudia Karvan
I’m excited to be posting the first official 52 Seasons review! It’s already clear how difficult it will be to distil a whole season into one review (and I will note spoilers before I mention them), but please wish me well as I begin with Bump.
Australian streaming service Stan launched all ten episodes of Bump on New Year’s Day 2021. The series, a Stan original production, has been created by former journalist Kelsey Munro and actor/producer Claudia Karvan, co-creator Love My Way (2004-07), Spirited (2010-11) and Doctor Doctor (2016-18). The official logline (a one-sentence premise) of the series is ‘two families collide when a surprise baby arrives.’
From the outset, Bump looks to explore the ‘what if’ scenario: ‘what if you had a baby in high school and you kept wanting to study’. As the logline mentions, school is only one factor of this series, with a focus on two families taking centre stage.
Olympia (Oly) Chalmers-Davis (Nathalie Morris) is one of those girls you hear about on terrible reality series like I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant (2008); she too had no idea she was pregnant. When quizzed by her best friend Reema (Safia Arain) post-birth, she states that she even got her period a couple of times during the pregnancy.
We meet Oly the day she gives birth. Jacinda Ardern adorns her bedroom wall. Malala Yousafzai and Gloria Steinem’s memoirs sit on her bedside table. She later dreams about answering questions on Emmeline Pankhurst in class. Angie (Claudia Karvan), Oly’s mother, dances to Latin music in her underwear, exhibiting a much more uninhibited persona, summoning an image of the responsible child/free-spirited parent dynamic.
During class one non-special day, Oly goes into labour. Adding scandal to trauma, we learn that Oly’s boyfriend Lachie (Peter Thurnwald) is not the father, with the paternity falling to Santi (Carlos Sanson Jnr) instead. Add in that Angie teaches at Oly’s school and has a flirtatious relationship with Santi’s father Matias (Ricardo Scheihing-Vasquez), the Physical Education teacher, and you’ve got a setup fraught for conflict and tension over a ten-episode arc.
Pregnant whip-smart protagonists like Oly summon up comparisons to Juno (2007), but these comparisons end quickly. Juno focuses on an unwanted pregnancy throughout the baby’s gestation, whereas Bump begins with the birth, taking the plot to a much different place. To some, this plot may seem far-fetched, and while the rate of births by teenage mothers has been declining over the last twenty years, the reality is that 6,600 babies were born to teenage mothers in 2017.
The titular ‘bump’ applies to many elements in this story: 1/ the literal bump that Oly had with her pregnancy (except, it was barely visible, so that loses potency fast) and, more importantly, 2/ the momentous jolt to everyday life and interpersonal relationships caused by baby’s arrival amongst the two very different families.
Bump undertakes a character study of two families from different cultural backgrounds and compares them with interesting results. The Chilean Hernandez family are concerned with tradition, close relationships and throwing lively parties with colourful clothing, mouth-watering food and constant dancing. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon Chalmers-Davis family are breaking apart and exhibit no specific cultural or religious associations. Angie was planning on breaking up with her partner (and Oly’s dad) Dom (Angus Sampson) the day Oly gave birth. These differences play upon each other throughout the whole series, with standout moments. One such moment comes when Santi’s girlfriend Angel (Catalina Palma Godoy) tells him that “just because you have an Australian baby, [shouldn’t mean you] forget who you are.”
Identity is also explored through a fantastic multicultural and diverse representation. Oly and Santi’s besties, Reema and Vince (Ioane Saula) are from Indian and Pacific Islander backgrounds respectively, adding to the mix of Latin, Asian and Anglo characters we’ve already seen. Lachie and new boyfriend Zac (Roman Delo) represent the queer community, best shown in a scene in episode 10 where Oly and Santi’s friends create a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ after the baby’s baptism in order to reclaim the baby’s “little soul for the rebels and the artists, the queers and the freaks and the geeks” as they sit in harmony with painted rainbows on their forehead.
Bump features great performances from Nathalie Morris and Claudia Karvan. Morris juggles Oly’s strength and vulnerability with precision and is finest in the first and last episodes of the season. Karvan provides great support and excels in her storyline with Matias, à la Diane Lane in the train scene in Unfaithful. Carlos Sanson Jnr gives a measured and calm performance as Santi, emanating an intriguing allure that results in good chemistry with Morris.
Bump also boasts many first-time television performances from Arain, Thurnwald, Saula, Scheihing-Vasquez, Palma Godoy and the very adorable Claudia Di Giusti, who plays Santi’s grandmother Bernardita. Angus Sampson rounds out the cast with the easy-going yet conflicted Dom, showing us a softer side to some of the more mad-capped performances we’re familiar with.
Series co-creator and writer Kelsey Munro heads up the writers room, giving us the most engaging episodes of the season (the first and last), with fellow writers Jessica Tuckwell, Timothy Lee, Mithila Gupta and Steven Arriagada all contributing compelling scripts throughout the series. Narrative twists and turns are handed to us along the way, with the slow reveal of many storylines taking shape as the episodes move by, best evidenced with the revelation of Santi’s mum’s death which was first mentioned in the first episode. None of that choppy dialogue revealing too much exposition here.
Composers David McCormack, Matteo Zingales and Anthony Partos provide a powerful yet not over-emotive score, though Angela Glaister’s strengths as the music supervisor sing with the inclusion of great Latin music amongst other great song choices. Standouts include two songs by Sweet Whirl (incorrectly credited as Sweet Swirl – in case you’re looking online and can’t find anything based on the credits) in episode 1 and ‘El Origen del Arcoiris’ by Camila Moreno, the final song that appears in the series.
Danielle Micich is credited as the series’ intimacy coach (advisors hired to choreograph intimate scenes between actors on film and television sets, read more here) and has been used well throughout the many sex scenes that feature in Bump. Directors Greg Bennett, Gracie Otto and Leticia Cáceres avoid gratuity and any sense of actor exploitation with these scenes, allowing the sex scenes to advance the plot and reveal intimacies between Oly and Santi. Each director expertly applies the same sensitivity to each episode, balancing compelling drama with moments of levity.
The baby’s birth may have been our gateway into the series, but the dramedy of Bump shines best when focusing on the dynamics of the family relationships of the two main families. At the time of writing, it is unknown if there will be a second season, and while Bump could be a standalone season, many, including this reviewer, will want to know what happens next.
Bump is streaming now on Stan.
Whole series screened for review.
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