Review: Bonding

The Netflix show created by Rightor Doyle was first released in 2019 and the second season took a while to arrive before coming out last month. The first season had been in the queue, but after the new one dropped, I spent a weekend watching both. It’s striking because the first season was perfectly fine. It was interesting. It was a character piece but it also leaned into the shock of being about a dominatrix.

That’s not to say it was bad, because it was a striking portrait of being closeted and the fear of being oneself. About how one can be close and then push those people away in self-destructive ways. About how we become broken and try to put ourselves back together. That last point is, I know, something problematic as people in the BDSM Community are wary of the idea that trauma leads people to BDSM. It doesn’t. We all have damage and some of those people are into bondage, but of course that’s not how it usually plays out in pop culture.

Having said that, after watching the first season, the second season was better. In every way. It was smarter, funnier, deeper. It introduced new characters and gave existing characters more to do. It brought the central themes of consent and intimacy into sharper focus. And while becoming a bigger show in every sense, it still kept the focus on these two central characters.

The show got heat for not being accurate in the first season and the show took that criticism and found a way to use that. To consider why the character would have behaved that way. How would it have made sense for those characters. And the result is a show that is more accurate but also more thoughtful. Not every show can take the legitimate and important criticism they receive and find a way to see it as valuable, to rethink what they got wrong, to consider how the criticism could make the show better.

Bonding, which in the second season was written by Doyle, Olivia Troy and Nana Mensah, managed to make a second season that was better than the first and they did so by listening to criticism. I don’t know whether there will be a third season, but it ended in a thoughtful and moving place with a lot of potential to become something even more exciting. Here’s hoping they get the chance.