Bonding: the argument the show started

Netflix released the first season of Bonding on 24 April 2019: seven episodes, none of them much longer than a quarter of an hour. Rightor Doyle created it and directed every episode of both seasons, and the premise came out of a stretch of his own life spent working as an assistant to a dominatrix. Zoe Levin plays Tiff, a graduate student who works as Mistress May. Brendan Scannell plays Pete, an old school friend who takes the assistant job because he is broke.

Within a week the series had an argument attached to it, and the argument has outlasted the show.

The objections were published, and they were specific

On 29 April 2019, Vice ran a review by Mistress Blunt, a New York dominatrix and sex worker rights activist, watching a depiction of her own trade. Her case was not that the series was unflattering. It was that a show advertising itself as a corrective to the stereotypes reproduced them, that negotiation and consent were largely missing from a workplace where they are most of the work, and that the lead character repeatedly pushes her assistant past a refusal he has already made. Blunt also made a point that tends to fall out of the summaries. Misrepresentation of sex work has effects outside the screen, and her review placed the series in the immediate aftermath of the FOSTA-SESTA legislation, when the material stakes were not theoretical.

ScreenRant published twice inside ten days. Quinn Hough, on 28 April, argued that the profession functions as a location rather than a subject, and quoted a working dominatrix on what a careless depiction costs the professional scene. Kayleena Pierce-Bohen, on 6 May, wrote the accuracy breakdown proper, and it is the more useful piece because it concedes as much as it withholds. On the credit side: the sheer variety of what clients want, the fact that a dominant’s manner inside a session is not their disposition outside it, the show’s framing of the work as a release from shame. On the debit side: consent is barely discussed before or during a session, there is no professional boundary at all between Tiff and Pete, and the dominants are written as pure authority with none of the caretaking the job actually consists of.

IndieWire covered both halves of the reaction, running the criticism and then Doyle’s response to it. That is a small thing worth noting on its own. The dispute was legible enough to the trade press that it became coverage rather than noise.

Then there is the collar. In the first season the dominatrix wears one, and in the scene a collar is a submissive’s item. Practitioners spotted it at once, and Variety later reported it as one of the specific things the second season set out to correct. Costume errors of that kind are diagnostic. They tell you not that a production was careless with a prop but that nobody in the room could read the vocabulary it was borrowing.

The complaint is structural before it is factual

Strip the individual errors away and something more durable remains. The series is built from Pete’s point of view. He is the newcomer, he is the audience surrogate, his nerves supply the comedy and his growth supplies the arc. Tiff is the profession he walks into.

That decision does more damage than any single missing negotiation, because it settles in advance who is allowed to be a person and who is allowed to be a job. The dominatrix runs every room in the series and is the least interior character in it. Her clients are comic objects, framed for the punchline of what they want. Pete is the only one whose fear the camera takes seriously.

It is also not an accident of a crowded writers’ room. Doyle created the series and directed all fifteen episodes himself, which is unusually complete authorship for a Netflix comedy and means the point of view is a single person’s and was chosen. A show can be made from the assistant’s side on purpose. What it cannot then do is present itself as a corrective to how the profession is understood, because a corrective has to be able to see the professional.

Blunt’s sharpest observation was in this register rather than the factual one: that the story was being told by someone adjacent to sex work rather than by anyone doing it. Read as a complaint about credentials it is easy to dismiss. Read as a complaint about point of view it is simply a description of the show’s structure. Ask the question this site asks of any picture of power, which is who has been permitted to look, and the answer across two seasons is the assistant.

Fifteen minutes cannot hold a negotiation

The format matters more than it looks. An episode of Bonding runs between thirteen and seventeen minutes. That is enough time for a joke, a session, a reversal and a soft landing. It is not enough time for two people to talk through what they are about to do, agree what will not happen, and settle how it stops.

Negotiation is the part of this material that television finds hardest, and not for the reasons usually given. It is not explicit. It is not shocking. It is slow, verbal, and structurally identical to a scene of people agreeing terms, which is the least dynamic thing a camera can watch. A drama with an hour to spend can absorb it. A short-form comedy has to cut it, and once it is cut the sessions look like things that happen to people rather than things people arranged.

So the most repeated criticism of the first season, that consent is absent, is partly a criticism of a commissioning decision. Short-form comedy was the format Netflix wanted, and the format eats the exact minutes the subject needs. Billions, running twelve hours a season, can afford the conversations. Obsession, running four episodes, cannot and does not try.

The second season is a correction you can watch happen

What makes Bonding worth a page is not the first season. It is the gap between the two.

Doyle brought in Olivia Troy, a BDSM professional and intimacy coordinator, and Variety’s account of the second season is essentially an account of a production being rebuilt around advice it had not previously sought: costume corrected, session detail corrected, community members cast rather than imagined. Troy’s own professional listing carries Bonding’s second season alongside Showtime’s Billions, which tells you how small the pool of people doing this work was at the time.

The result is a second season that reviewers found noticeably different. Joho’s Mashable notice is the clearest on what changed: less time on the leather, more on communication and the setting of boundaries. The show also turns on its own protagonist, treating the first season’s behaviour as behaviour rather than as charm.

This is a thing only television can do. A film is finished when it is finished, and a director who mishandles a subject can answer critics in interviews but not in the work. A renewed series can answer in the work, and the answer is legible because the earlier version is still sitting there for comparison. Nothing in the feature cluster on this site offers anything similar. Secretary has been argued about for twenty years and remains exactly the film it was on release.

What the argument is really about

Netflix cancelled Bonding in July 2021, after two seasons and fifteen short episodes. It is not enough television to settle anything.

What survives is a dispute that keeps recurring in this material and is usually conducted badly, laid out here about as clearly as it ever gets. One side says the depiction is wrong in checkable ways, and it was. The other side says a comedy is not a manual, which is also true, and does not answer the first point. The productive version of the argument, the one Blunt and Pierce-Bohen were both circling from different directions, is narrower: a show gets to choose its genre, but it does not get to choose whose experience the genre is built out of. Bonding chose the assistant. Almost everything the practitioners objected to follows from that choice rather than from carelessness, and the second season, for all its corrections, never revisited it.