Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Surrogacy’ On Netflix, Where A Woman Is Forced To Become A Surrogate For A Powerful Mexican Family

One thing that you need to remember before you watch The Surrogacy, a new Netflix drama from Mexico, is that using a surrogate to expand your family was illegal in the entire country prior to 2021. So families with means needed to resort to some deperate measure in order to find and retain a surrogate. Maybe not as dramatic as we see in this series, but then it wouldn’t be a telenovela if things weren’t dramatic.

THE SURROGACY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman starts a video on a camcorder and sits down. She’s holding her pregnant belly. The date in the corner says “Sep 2005.”

The Gist: In the video, the woman, Yeni (Shani Lozano), has already picked out a name for the baby, even though she’s a surrogate and renting out her womb. She’s become that attached to the baby growing inside of her.

Ten months earlier, Yeni is driving with her father when a car pulls up beside them, then blocks their way. They men come out and attempt to take Yeni at gunpoint, but her father fights them; in the process he shoots one of the men dead and hits the other one in the leg.

Even though he was defending himself, he still gets arrested. This wasn’t quite part of the plan that Julia (Marcela Guirado) and her husband Carlos (Luis Ernesto Franco) put together with their family’s lawyer. They wanted to scare Yeni into agreeing to be Julia’s surrogate. Now they plan on forcing Julia to do it in order to spring her father out of prison.

Surrogacy is illegal in Mexico, and the fact that Carlos and Julia are using it meets with disapproval from Carlos’ mother Elena (Leticia Calderón), a powerful pharmaceutical executive who is desperate for a grandchild. Elena is busy fending off lawsuits from mothers who underwent a treatment that left their children with birth defects, which causes the doctor doing the study (Fernanda Borches) to quit. But there’s a catch: If she can see Yeni’s pregnancy to term, she can be released from Elena’s clutches.

Yeni moves into the family home, watched closely by Carlos, with whom she develops feelings. We cut to the day she’s ready to have the pre-determined c-section. At this point, the doctor has found out that Yeni is having twins, but Elena insists on keeping her in the dark about it. When Yeni finally gives birth, the girl is given to Julia and Carlos, but the boy, who’s born with a club foot, is rejected by Elena for not being perfect.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If you made Servant into a telenovela, it would be The Surrogacy (Original title: Madre de alquiler).

Our Take: The first episode of The Surrogacy, created by Araceli Guajardo, quickly sets up the story, giving us mostly flat characters that we’ve seen in plenty of other telenovelas. The evil and biting matriarch of a rich family, the scion who doesn’t go against his mother, the less-privileged person that gets sucked into the rich family’s vortex.

But the first episode also signals that the story is less about the forced surrogacy all by itself but also about the fact that Yeni wakes up in a park with a club-footed baby boy in her arms; she has no idea who he is, whose baby it is or why she has it.

Will she be a great mother to the boy? Sure. But is she going to figure out that she had twins, and will she try to reunite the boy with his sister? How did she get embroiled with Carlos? And just why in the heck is Elena and her pharmaceutical company in such hot water?

It’s that kind of intrigue that makes shows like this watchable. And Lozano plays Yeni as not quite innocent or naïve, but probably more trusting than she should be. It’ll be interesting to see the character’s transition as she becomes more informed about just what Elena and her family did to manipulate her fate.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode. We see a transition scene of Yeni’s belly expand to show the passage of time.

Parting Shot: Like we mentioned, Yeni wakes up on a park bench with a baby in her arms. A crowd surrounds her and wonders where she got the baby. She has no idea that her father, whom she did the surrogacy to free from jail, died after being hit by a car; he was chased by the man he shot in the leg.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Fernanda Borches as the doctor, only because she seems to be the only character with any scruples in Elena’s circle.

Most Pilot-y Line: Carlos reminds Yeni that she agreed to a c-section. “Remember?” he asks. “Yes, thank you,” she replies sarcastically. “You also made me forget that I’m just a rented womb.” Subtle.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Surrogacy has some stock telenovela characters, but its central story is so full of story possibilities that we’ll give it a pass and see how things develop.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.