'Kill the Baby' is the best webseries about the futile horrors of child rearing

Heaven forbid that I am seen to endorse the murder of our species' newest members but babies can be pretty annoying. Expensive, crying all the time, keeping crackhead hours, and obeying a loose philosophy regarding waste management—if it weren't for the familial bond there's a good chance they'd just be left where they dropped.

So Kill the Baby—a new comedy webseries from Alex & Ariel—might make a little bit of sense to those sleep-rationed parents forking out over $1,000 for a new Bugaboo Cameleon 3. Lying awake at night, a father, Isaac (played by David Geis), is driven to murderous thoughts and finds the accelerating menace of his inner monologue fed by the constant wailing of his newborn.

It's that monologue—voiced separately and confidently by Demorge Brown—which is the tinderbox of the series' humor; bumping and chafing against reality and the father's hopeless persona. It acts as a strong motivator, cajoling Isaac to go ahead with the act and it is only unwitting self-sabotage that comes between success and failure. 

But there's plenty to laugh about and for that Kill the Baby deserves credit; it's tough to trade in such dark material and then play it for laughs without succumbing to melodrama. Even more to its benefit is how the humor is derived not from the intended act itself, but rather by Isaac's inability to execute his intentions—not just a result of the father's incompetence but also, comfortingly, a product of the show's slight but overhanging thread of humanity. 

Screengrab via Alex and Ariel/YouTube