Does ‘Babes’ Offer Accidental Evidence That the Judd Apatow Era of Comedy is Officially Over?

The poster says it all: Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, staring at the audience and at a home pregnancy test, respectively, with looks of consternation and low-key panic, against a generic fade background. These aren’t glamour shots adorning the poster for the new comedy Babes; they’re designed to accentuate the relatable awkwardness and, given the style of the poster, recall the same qualities from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the (nearly) 20-year-old comedy classic from Judd Apatow and Steve Carell. As an A.V. Club writer detailed last week, the poster for Virgin has been shockingly influential over the past two decades, using an ironic yearbook aesthetic to emphasize a movie’s comic protagonist and, ideally, lack of artifice.

The imagery has branched out to movies that have nothing to do with Apatow-related movies and that poster style, as the piece suggests, is pretty played out. But what about the type of movie it’s supposed to represent, and that Babes – with its ads dropping Bridesmaids comparisons – grows out of? It probably wouldn’t be fair to attribute loosely structured comedies with grounded emotions but heightened dialogue riffs solely to writer/director/producer Judd Apatow, but he certainly helped popularize the form with 40-Year-Old Virgin. But comedies that play in wide theatrical release are fewer and further between these days; Babes is an indie movie from hip distributor Neon, while the recent trailer for an R-rated Will Ferrell comedy (the sort of thing Apatow also had a hand in when he produced Step Brothers) trumpeted a January 2025 debut… on Prime Video. Meanwhile, industry news site Puck has run a story about Apatow’s troubles getting a new project off the ground and waning overall influence. So can the Apatow Comedy be saved? Should it be? Babes simultaneously suggests substantial life and a certain tiredness – despite coming from a creative team younger and seemingly more plugged-in than Apatow.

Apatow’s own attempt to break from his usual rhythms and make something a little looser, sillier, and more outlandish with the Netflix feature The Bubble resulted in his worst reviews ever as a director, and with good cause: Despite some funny scenes and moments, the movie flails like nothing he’s ever made before. (Prior to this, if anything his movies started drifting more toward dramedy territory, where a lack of laughs could be frustrating, but wouldn’t clang quite so loudly as they do in failed farce.) Maybe he was just taking a break from a more grounded raunch-with-heart style (he’s floated the idea of This Is 50, continuing the story of characters from Knocked Up and This Is 40, as his next film), but maybe he’s just run out of ways for adults to belatedly come of age.

Babes, meanwhile, comes from actor-director Pamela Adlon, making her feature debut following her TV show Better Things (and appearing in Apatow’s The King of Staten Island). It’s written by star Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, both of Broad City, and loosely follows the Bridesmaids template of besties threatened by life stages; instead of one woman getting married while the other’s life remains messy and unfulfilling, happily single Eden (Ilana Glazer) accidentally performs a sloppy game of catch-up to her married-with-two-kids bestie Dawn (Michelle Buteau) when Eden gets pregnant – and decides to keep the baby as a single mom. Dawn tries her best to maintain cautious optimism in the face of Eden’s conviction that they can handle this together – but there’s much less “together” than Eden realizes, given that Dawn is still recovering from her second childbirth, navigating the twin hells of New York City real estate and childcare, and secretly convinced her friend has no idea how hard this all is.

Glazer had her first child in 2021, and her previous movie as a star and writer was the pregnancy-themed horror film False Positive – so clearly these issues are close to her heart (or, as it were, her uterus). And that’s what really resonates in Babes: The unvarnished honesty with which the movie portrays pregnancy and its aftermath, using the different stages of its two protagonists to cover twice as much of this ground. Recent parents especially will laugh, or maybe just shudder, in recognition.

In that way, Babes more closely resembles This Is 40 than Bridesmaids (which Apatow produced but didn’t direct) or 40-Year-Old Virgin – because while the movie has laughs, some of them extremely and purposefully raunchy, it doesn’t develop any comic set pieces that will linger like Kristen Wiig getting high on the airplane or destroying the giant cookie in Bridesmaids, or Steve Carell getting waxed in Virgin. The Apatow-ish riffs in Babes feel a little warmed-over, especially with Glazer essentially repurposing the dynamic of Broad City without Abbi Jacobson. (There’s even something kind of sad about seeing Glazer’s character gas up a non-Jacobson character so enthusiastically; both the schtick and the affection feel secondhand.) The movie doesn’t flop around like the worst, most strained studio comedies, and it’s certainly in no danger of becoming one of those Netflix-ready nice-coms that seems designed to inspire polite smiles rather than genuine laughs. At its best, it’s emotionally raw and even, in its final scene, surprisingly moving. It’s much better than The Bubble, in other words.

But Glazer and Buteau don’t have the refreshing conversational believability that made Seth Rogen pop in Knocked Up, or the admirable raggedness Kristen Wiig brought to Bridesmaids. The comedy bits of the movie feel more self-consciously performed, even when those performers are allowed some improvisational looseness. This isn’t the usual complaint about Apatow movies – that the improvised bits are allowed to go on too long, and nothing substitutes for a good, tight script. (That’s true in theory, but like all good rules, is subject to myriad exceptions.) It’s a weirder middle ground between scripted clunkiness and improv noodling; the same was true for last year’s intermittently funny but wildly uneven Joy Ride. Apatow always had a little trouble reconciling the nagging, realistic insecurities of his characters with a built-in belief that things will turn out OK for them, usually because of some unseen income source that leaves plenty of time for personal growth. Babes has this, too; even its lovely final moments, it’s predicating some happiness on real estate that it takes a successful career as a dentist to afford.

Obviously the shortcomings of Babes can’t be laid at Apatow’s feet any more than its best moments can; the man had no direct involvement in this movie. It does suggest, however, that Apatow’s creative power has diminished past the point where doing a new spin on his style reads as particularly fresh. The more unnerving factor is that it doesn’t feel like a particular film comedy movement has emerged to take the place of what was so dominant for so long. Apatow was influential not so much because of his singular directorial vision but because he seemed so focus on collaboration, boosting the careers of Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, Amy Schumer, Lena Dunham, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Jason Segel, among others, just by giving them room to figure out how to turn their personas, fixations, and neuroses into accessible comic creations. (He comes across like a more benevolent, less aloof Lorne Michaels.)

Adlon gives Babes a nice New York City warmth and a sense of honesty that cuts through its schtickiest moments, but it feels, understandably, like a for-hire job; she can’t make it her business to figure out how to turn Glazer into a movie star. Right now, despite all of the stars Apatow helped foster, the comedy landscape looks weirdly lonely, an aftermath of the This Is The End-style apocalypse. It’s hard to find big, generous laughs in a new era of streaming austerity.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.