Lisa and Stephen are good. “You good?” asks Stephen (Paapa Essiedu), plonking himself next to his wife on the sofa. “Yeah,” replies Lisa (Siobhán Cullen) from the depths of her oversize fleece hoodie. “Good,” says Stephen. “All good.”

Lisa and Stephen love each other and when Lisa has a miscarriage, then another miscarriage, they don’t talk about it, not really, because you don’t, do you? It’s just one of those things. “Gotta stay positive,” as Stephen says. “Eyes up, move forwards.”

They refuse to let their losses define them. Besides, as Lisa points out, no one else understands, do they? Not really. “We are,” she says, “so alone.” And so they tighten the drawstrings of their relationship, pull together and, in their happy-sad amniotic cocoon, continue to do what they’ve always done. Chin up. Get on with it. Put it all behind them.

So, yeah, Lisa and Stephen are good. All good.

Created, written and directed by Stefan Golaszewski, Babies is a drama about communication. It’s about what happens when people don’t, or can’t, ask for what they need, either because this makes them feel vulnerable or embarrassed, or because they fear the response will reveal something about themselves they would rather not have to face.

So, here are Lisa and Stephen. And here, too, are Stephen’s best friend, Dave, and his new girlfriend, Amanda. Dave (Jack Bannon) is a passive-aggressive wide boy, whose relationship with his young son is abysmal and his lack of self-awareness significantly worse. An inveterate banterer, Dave longs for emotional connection, but his terror of intimacy and inability to not say things such as “I can’t stand the sanitisation of the global west” casts doubt on his capacity for long-term romantic success. He is, to echo the words of one observer, “a prick”.

Amanda (Charlotte Riley), meanwhile, is … well. It’s difficult to say. Of Babies’ four exquisitely complicated main characters, she is perhaps the most complex; a stiff-jawed, meticulously bloused acquisitions manager who vacillates between near-mute self-preservation and lacerating emotional veracity. I think. Nothing here is straightforward.

Over six episodes, we follow the couples as they navigate their relationships and attempt to find some degree of happiness.

As with Golaszewski’s previous creations – Marriage, Him & Her, and the quietly miraculous Mum – Babies doesn’t have much in the way of plot. Information is released slowly, with even relatively minor revelations – a loathed acquaintance is pregnant; a seemingly laid-back family member is an emotional manipulator – landing like bombs. We fear the fallout from our protagonists’ reactions to these discoveries. We want to protect them from themselves.

The thread – the umbilical cord, if you will – that wends through this extraordinarily tense jumble of emotions is Lisa and Stephen’s longing to conceive. There are gloriously quotidian montages of their efforts to board the pregnancy hamster wheel: the frantic sex, the laughing at the insensitivity of doctors (“yeah, we’re all good, hahaha”), the sitting on the edge of the bath while staring tearfully at a plastic wee-stick. The many hospital scenes are similarly well observed, albeit difficult to watch (as astute a director as he is a writer, Golaszewski knows precisely when not to look away).

Like 2022’s Marriage, Babies asks more questions than it answers. Does grief excuse selfishness? What makes one death more significant than another? At what point does a positive mindset become a cudgel with which to obliterate the truth?

The series is a feat of narrative engineering. So many expertly assembled little cogs and pistons working in harmony. It’s an unapologetically adult drama, too, albeit one unafraid to end an emotionally devastating scene with a joke about Chicken Cottage.

Quibbles? The themes of toxic masculinity and generational trauma are, at times, slightly overplayed. And the treacly, busker-ish theme tune (which is, inexplicably, performed by Golaszewski himself)? Best to scurry past it with head down and hands in pockets.

But enough carping. With this unsettling, compassionate, funny, moving, wildly unpredictable and beautifully acted series, Golaszewski has given us something very special indeed. Babies, then. It’s all good.