Fosse/Verdon Review: Me and My Baby (Season 1 Episode 3)
In Fosse/Verdon Season 1 Episode 3 “Me and My Baby,” we gain greater insight into the ebbs and flows of Gwen’s career and the varying men in her life. It’s a devastating study in contrast.
The show runners for Fosse/Verdon have been insistent about their intention to shine line on both icons, bringing Gwen out of the shadows and giving her equal attention to Bob. In doing so, the show is certainly giving Michelle Williams literally hours of Emmy-reel worthy material.
The pacing of the show seems to slow when it switches to Bob, and on this episode, his individual story is simply less compelling.
In the case of Gwen, we are given the opportunity to start to piece together some of the psychology behind her choices and see the common theme of her swallowing the humiliation from men around her.
Bob’s story, around his panic during the Cabaret editing process, is less interesting.
While it’s fun to see skillful recreations of the movie, like Joel Grey’s (Ethan Slater) “Two Ladies” number, there’s less for Sam Rockwell to really bite into and we are not left with much of a better understanding of Bob than we had before. That’s desperately needed.
Hopefully, that will change later in the season. I’d like to feel like the quality of the stories are a bit more equally matched.
What the episode does achieve is illuminate just how much Gwen and Bob bring out the best and worst in each other.
Watching, I was struck by how well they know how to hurt each other, but I also started to understand why they kept coming back to one another.
As shocked and as frustrated as I was to feel it, after the events of the episode, I felt a small bit of relief to see Gwen end up back in the editing room with Bob…but more on that in a moment.
Some of the early scenes of the episodes show the more immediate fallout of the dissolution of Gwen and Bob’s marriage.
When Gwen does not immediately acquiesce to Bob’s request to come help him edit Cabaret and instead questions why his German translator muse is not available to help, Bob is clearly annoyed.
This moment, as Gwen dryly comments that the translator must know the movie “inside and out, forwards and backwards, up and down, up and down” is so deliciously snarky, I’ve watched it multiple times over.
Bob knows exactly the right buttons to push, criticizing Gwen’s decision to be in a straight play instead of helping him. After all, she can’t act and straight plays are much more difficult than musicals; she won’t be able to rely on her charm or a “funny walk.”
It’s damning criticism and clearly hits a nerve, and it’s even more painful when we see that Gwen is forced to hear that criticism — albeit delivered in other ways — from her director in the show. (Spoiler alert: the play was a notorious flop, opening and closing in the same day).
Bob’s ability to go for the jugular is shown again when, in the midst of giving Gwen advice about how to handle a challenging monologue in her new show, he snidely remarks “What do you know about boys? You’ve never raised one.”
This references Gwen’s son from her first marriage, who she left in her parents’ care when she relaunched her dancing career. The topic of her is clearly a sore subject for Gwen, and the show demonstrates this in several ways.
At a key moment for Gwen — an uproarious ovation for her Broadway debut — there’s a soundtrack of a baby crying playing alongside the cacophony of applause. With success, it seems, comes considerable loss and sacrifice.
There is also the matter of her son’s existence for that matter. While this is not commonly accepted knowledge, Fosse/Verdon posits that Gwen was raped as a teenager by family friend/talent manager/reporter, James Henaghan (Santino Fontana) and then was forced to marry him when her family discovered she was pregnant.
This moment is a turning point for Gwen and in some ways, it starts to become easier to understand why she gravitated towards Bob in the first place, despite all his aforementioned difficulties.
With her first husband, she was overtly taken advantage of — a child cornered in a bedroom and then forced to take on very adult responsibilities without any sense of choice. The power dynamic was always off.
With Bob, at least, there’s a sense of push and pull, and as we see later on the episode, a deep understanding between the two.
Just as we see Bob contrasted with Gwen’s husband, we also seem him contrasted with her director for Children! Children!, the straight play she has been cast in.
Michelle Williams does a beautiful job expressing Gwen’s discomfort as she takes notes after a rehearsal. As she gets more corrections and feedback, she tries to remain chirpy and charming but the mask is harder and harder to maintain as she feels increasingly out of her depth.
When she asks — even begs — the director to be more specific so she can understand what he wants — it’s to no avail. He is thoroughly unimpressed by everything she does.
While frustrating to see her go back to Bob and help him with editing, especially after his ugliness earlier, it is also more understandable after what we see transpire at rehearsal.
Watching Bob and Gwen bounce off of each other, quickly communicating ideas back and forth and getting to the root of what needs to be done for the film, it’s clear they possess a fluency with one another that Gwen does not receive elsewhere.
Bob needs her and validates her, and even if it’s not at the level she deserves, it’s something.
Episode after episode, the editing for this show continues to awe and astonish. While I was initially skeptical about jumping around among so many different time periods, it’s a device that ultimately adds a great deal.
The magnitude of the rise and fall of Gwen’s career would not feel as striking were these key periods not paired up so closely for easy comparison.
Similarly, Gwen’s nurturing, careful approach to parenting her daughter, Nicole, would not be as easily understood without the context of what happened to her as a teenager or the knowledge that she sacrificed raising her son earlier in her life.
All of this is far more powerful when portrayed this way as opposed to in a totally linear timeline.
Overall, the series is shaping up quite nicely, and delivering more on the promise of highlighting Gwen than I might have thought after watching Fosse/Verdon Season 1 Episode 1 “Life is a Cabaret.”
What did you think of this episode of Fosse/Verdon? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Fosse/Verdon airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on FX.
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Cristina Iskander
Cristina is a Broadway enthusiast, book lover, and pop-culture fanatic living in New York City. She once won a Fantasy Bachelor contest (yes, like Fantasy Football, but for The Bachelor), and can banter about old school WB (Pacey + Joey FTW) just as well as Stranger Things and Pen15. She's still upset Benson and Stabler never got together and is worried Rollins and Carisi are headed down the same road, wants justice for Shangela, and hopes to one day walk-and-talk down a hallway with Aaron Sorkin.