200 words about Netflix's Adam Sandler

The baby voice cometh, the baby voice goeth

At the dawn of the new century, Adam Sandler made Little Nicky then abandoned his baby voice. His evolution, as he seemed to scheme it, involved replacing warmhearted simpletons like Bobby Boucher and lovable wads like Happy Gilmore with a series of casually cruel men who did not talk in baby voices -- see: Henry (50 First Dates) and Michael (Click) and Chuck (with Larry) and George (Funny People). Into the 2010s, Sandler entered his second decade of no baby voice. Box office plateaued, then fell. But Netflix, magnanimous beacon of Never Letting Go, recognized that Adam Sandler needed his baby voice, needed to double down on it. So they bought him. And he made Sandy Wexler. He made Hubie Halloween. He clinched his throat and brought up bile. He bent his posture back into that of a Benjamin Buttoned Nosferatu, crooked and shuffling with the clear-eyed energy of arrested development. From this conch echoed once again the baby voice, the sound of a friendly dipshit that, more than 20 years later, has repeated and swollen with meaning. Now I hear in it a desire for characters vulnerable and sincere. I hear a lack of malice, the goofy whisper of home.