Summary
Daughter From Another Mother uses a familiar concept to unpack the idea of family, delivering laughs and genuine sentiment in about equal measure.
This review of Daughter From Another Mother is spoiler-free.
You’d think that the crux of Daughter From Another Mother, a new nine-part Mexican dramedy now streaming on Netflix, would be in two women taking home the wrong children. As it happens, that’s just the hook. The real fun begins when, a few months later, those same two women are told about the mistake and have to swap back, having already developed a significant bond.
That’s much meatier territory, both for drama and for comedy, especially once two separate families become one large, peculiar one in order to try and make the dynamic work. Naturally, both mothers are radically different in their values, socioeconomic status, and approach to mothering, so there’s conflict there, but both also have people and responsibilities in their lives — cheating spouses, unreliable baby-daddies, money woes, etc. — that complicate matters further.
At 40 minutes an episode, Daughter From Another Mother has plenty of time and space to punctuate the jokes with genuine sentiment and character development. It’s a funny show, this, and has already proved popular here and there, but its real strength is in the relatively realistic approach it takes to the premise, really leaning into the idea of the mother-daughter bond as a primitive impulse, by no means dependent on biological relation. Big questions of what it means to be a parent, how quickly emotional connections can form, and how difficult they can be to break, give what would otherwise be a light and inconsequential series a real sense of dramatic heft.
With a second season already on the horizon, Netflix might be onto another international hit here. The episodes being entirely in subtitled Spanish with no English dubbing options might be an obstacle for some, but it’s worth putting aside for the sake of a personable, funny, and sometimes moving dramedy.
