Someone at Netflix has a vendetta against bees. And they will not rest until we see the fuzzy insects for the villains they are. First, there’s the bee that murdered Lord Bridgerton while he innocently picked flowers for his wife, thereby traumatizing his eldest son Anthony for life—or at least a decade—in Bridgerton. (Bees, in general, are a thing on that show.) Now, the streaming platform is releasing another series featuring a bee haunting a man. Man Vs. Bee follows a man whose quest to swat away the bee haunting him leads to disaster—a whole lot of it. And the trailer looks ridiculous and amazing.
In the film, Rowan Atkinson plays a man housesitting. And like all good horror movies, he’s alone in a beautiful home when an uninvited guest appears: the titular bee. Things devolve into chaos as he tries to take the bee down and it looks like he eventually sets the house on fire? The series looks like it takes Mr. Bean’s natural chaos and hands it a blowtorch.
Naturally, one must ask: “Is the bee in Man Vs. Bee part of the same hive as the Bridgerton bee?” Given what we know about bees and stings, it’s not the same bee. But, this may be a case of a hive seeking revenge on the streaming platform trying to smear its name.
Man Vs. Bee is just the latest bit of media confirming Big Bee’s hold over us. In the third grade, just a few years after my very first bee sting, we read The Taste of Blackberries in class, in which a character dies from a bee sting. It rocked me to my core. (I was just a few more years away from watching My Girl for the first time.) But bee-related content isn’t just about tragic bee stings. There’s Bee Movie, a bonkers movie in which a worker bee sues all humans—from the honey industry to Sting—and falls in love with a human. And then my beloved Wild Mountain Thyme, a movie in which Jamie Dornan quite literally thinks he’s a bee. (It is perfect!) Even the Transformers movie’s Bumblebee counts. And there are many, many others.
Where will Man Vs. Bee sit in the greater canon of bees in TV, movies, and books? Only time will tell. Man Vs Bee drops on June 24.