In the new OUTtv comedy One Baby, Please!, the Barbadian-Egyptian couple learn fast that wanting a child is the easy part. Even with adoption, IVF and artificial insemination all on the table, queer couples run into systems that make them prove they deserve to be parents in ways straight couples never have to.

The show takes on that reality with humour while keeping its weight. Institutional norms and policies around queer parenthood remain archaic and homophobic, but the series deliberately keeps them in the background. 

The couple's biggest hurdle sits closer to home. They have to convince their parents, whose cultural roots run deep, that two gay men can raise a child.

Dieon is played by Barbadian Canadian co-creator Adrian Neblett, and Omar is played by Egyptian Canadian co-creator Karim Adam Ahmed. The two built the characters from their own real-life identities, and that gave them the plot: an overly involved Egyptian mom and a Barbadian dad who need convincing that their gay sons can handle being parents.

Neblett isn't queer himself, but playing Dieon still caused conflict in his own family. "When the proof of concept went out onto the internet, I had a reaction from a family member who reached out and said, 'What's this I see with you on the internet?' I played dumb. I asked, 'What are you talking about?' He replied, 'About you wanting to marry a man and kiss a man.' I said, 'Well, it's a project I'm working on.' The response was, in Barbadian parlance, 'Left out that gay shit.'"

Neblett didn't continue the conversation, though he has seen this relative since. For him, the exchange shows how intolerant some Black communities still are.

Neblett's parents emigrated from Barbados to Canada in the late 1960s during the Great Migration. He grew up in Montreal and moved to Vancouver 16 years ago to pursue acting, figuring there would be fewer Black people there and that could work in his favour. Then the pandemic hit. Neblett moved into a new apartment and found out a fellow actor lived in his building. “Because everybody had their pods, we would be each other's self tape partners. We'd just go back and forth between each other's apartments."

ONE BABY, PLEASE! premiered Monday, November 2 on OUTtv, streaming across Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.

With work slowing down, that neighbour pushed Neblett to start making his own projects, then handed him one of his short queer love-story scripts. Neblett pulled a team together and shot it. Ahmed was on that team. He later asked whether Neblett could produce other shows, and that collaboration grew into One Baby, Please!

Neblett signed on as a producer. Vancouver didn't have many Black Caribbean queer actors to choose from, and when the actor they cast stepped down, Neblett took the role himself. That let him base Dieon on his own background, and the character went from Jamaican to Barbadian. Both co-creators pulled from personal stories to colour the absurd characters based on their parents, and even their friends.

They also reached out to queer friends they knew who had gone through the process of having kids. They wanted to understand the level of scrutiny queer couples face compared to heterosexual couples. Neblett shares, "Karim has a community of folks that he was pulling from. My wanting-to-be-an-ally heart knew there's a certain level of injustice when straight folks can just bump in the night with no tests. No questions of, 'are you financially in a position to be able to do this? Are you psychologically in a position to do this?' When Karim brought this to me, I felt this was a great place to do this sort of examination."

Neblett came to the story as an ally, relying on Ahmed and the people around them who had lived it. He also sees a pattern in how acceptance gets handed out in society, where winning it for one group does nothing to guarantee it for the next. "As a Black person, you experience things a certain way, and it's not lost on me how the powers that be in our society seem to make us all go through parallel struggles. If one group fights for acceptance or visibility it's just not automatically afforded to the next group. They also have to go through their same parallel struggle."

Neblett worries the intolerance he ran into at home also shrinks casting options for Black actors, whether through fears of homophobia or actors holding back from coming out. "Since being [in Vancouver], I've seen the number grow, and I've seen people start to understand from a casting perspective, that we are not entirely monolithic. Back in the day, if the character said Black or African American on the call sheet, you'd be in the room and you'd look around and you'd have the whole gamut from 20 year olds all the way to 70 year olds going out for the same role. Since that time, I've seen a change but there's also a certain cultural expectation that prevents a lot of us from being actors in the first place."

He's also still pushing back on stereotypes about what a Black character can be, partly because there are so few Black actors in the mix. "One of my goals, as I continue to make things, is to add to the diversity of what is seen as Black on television," he shares. 

"Somebody who grew up in Saskatchewan by themselves can say, 'Oh yeah, I see myself in that character. I'm Black too. I get to belong.' And for the rest of the world to just know that there's more than just three archetypes of Black people."

Neblett hopes One Baby, Please! does that for more than one community. "I hope our show allows some other people to see themselves, and perhaps opens the conversation and normalizes that there is no one way to make family." He adds, "We specifically wrote this show from a positive, aspirational point of view. We did not want our characters to be 'surviving' being gay. They are gay, they're in love, they're doing their life, and they want to grow their family. That was actually a very specific choice.”

"One Baby, Please! is ultimately a story about family," Neblett says. "The characters happen to be [part of] Caribbean, Arab, immigrant, and queer communities, but the desire to build a family, it's universal. What interested us was exploring that journey through cultures and perspectives that aren't often seen. I've never seen this on TV. We're filling that space."

ONE BABY, PLEASE! premiered Monday, November 2 on OUTtv, streaming across Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.