Netflix’s The Man with 1000 Kids tells the shocking story of Jonathan Jacob Meijer, a “serial sperm donor” who has admitted to donating sperm for 500-600 children – but some say the number is actually in the thousands. The three-episode mini-series follows a group of families raising a child in part reared by Meijer.
The episodes
Directed by Josh Allott, the three episodes follow a pretty simple structure: The first episode introduces all of the main families in the show, how they met Meijer, and how Meijer went on to father their child (or children in many cases). There’s one striking story about how a single mother wasn’t able to get pregnant via artificial insemination, so believing him to be an honest man, she and Meijer procreate “the old-fashioned way.”
The second episode follows the new parents as they discover that Meijer is not the small-level donor that he tells them he is; no, he is prolific. With children on at least five continents (I can’t verify Asia or Antarctica), Meijer is the polar opposite of what he told families he was. In the middle part of the series, families start to understand the scope of his misdeeds. As the episode goes on, they start to connect with each other on the internet, building up the tension for the final episode.
Said final episode takes this interconnected group of parents and shows how they got Meijer to stop his serial donations. While he isn’t in the episode (or the series as a whole), his presence is made up for with assemblies of clips from his YouTube videos. These clips are juxtaposed by a court case that a group of parents made against him in order to get him to stop donating and to request his sperm back from any place that has it stored.
What to make of 1,000 kids
Yeah. It’s more gross than you think it is. Meijer lied to hundreds of families about how many times he has donated sperm, stopping donating, and – a couple of times – who’s sperm he was giving people. You heard that right. In the third episode, it is revealed that sometimes Meijer would combined his sperm with that of his business partner and give the mixture to families, creating what is essentially a game of spermatic roulette. In a series of jaw-dropping moments, this is the one that sticks with me.
Setting aside the sociopathic need for power, this is the moment where Meijer goes from a sick human to a monster. At first, he wants to be animalistic – his term, not mine – someone who procreates incessantly, but he turns into someone who views these families, and his resulting children, as his playthings; he rips them of their humanity and effectively turns them into numbers in his listbook – he does, in fact, keep a secret list of all of the children he has.
The dehumanization is made even more the case during the final episode: his trial. He says that his children should have an emblem on their social media accounts so they don’t accidentally fall in love. More than that, when asked how many children he had, he didn’t give a number. He didn’t consult his list. No, he said about 500. It’s horrific how mechanically he acts and how emotionless he is. That’s the point of the whole docu-series. It’s to document that people like this exist and that we need to put legislation and rules in place to stop them.
The filmmaking doesn’t live up to the story
The Man with 1000 Kids is a solid story, but the three-episode structure is far too drawn out. It would do better as a 60 or 90-minute feature. Because of its 135-minute length, the limited story, while interesting, is too drawn out to fit over the extended time of the series. Simply put, The Man with 1000 Kids needed to be a film rather than a show.
When it comes to watching the docu-series, you feel both its length and its lack of visual creativity. Each shot feels like recycled b-roll that you buy from some third-party. They feel unspecific and bland, canned at the start of Netflix’s entrance into the docu-series game and reused ever since. There are some shots where – because of his absence from the series – they shot vague scenes with some blonde, curly-haired man who types on his computer or walks into the bathroom. All of it feels quite uninspired.
The story of the docu-series is wildly engaging, but the visuals are so boring that honestly I would rather listen to it as a podcast than watch it as a film. Visually, it certainly is another one of Netflix’s bland pieces of content that will be forgotten in a couple of weeks. Honestly, I recommend the New York Times piece mentioned in the series, one that inspired other articles across the world, and possibly inspired the series as a whole.
The Man With 1000 Kids is now streaming on Netflix.
Learn more about the series by visiting the official Netflix site.
You might also like…
