Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) is a 37-year-old woman who has devoted her considerable energies to building a successful career. She is vice-president of Round Earth Organic Market and has an elegant and lush apartment in Philadelphia. But now she wants a baby before it is too late. Kate first tries a sperm bank, but her pregnancy test is negative. A fertility specialist tells her that due to her physical makeup the chances of her having her own baby are about a million-to-one. So she decides to see Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver) who runs a surrogate center and charges $100,000 for the process. Kate meets Angie (Amy Poehler), a working-class woman whose common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard) is a hustler. Kate is not very impressed with her but decides to go ahead anyway convinced that she will be able to transform her into the perfect vehicle for delivering a healthy and happy baby.

Michael McCullers directs this middling comedy which goes for easy laughs and contains several characters who are nothing more than caricatures. One of them is Kate's New Age boss (Steve Martin) who has assigned her responsibility for opening a new store. In the neighborhood, she meets a local juice-bar owner (Greg Kinnear) who naturally falls in love with her. Just to complicate things even more, Angie leaves Carl and has no place else to go so she moves in with Kate. Of course, the two clash. Kate tries to control Angie, and Angie tries to loosen Kate up by taking her out dancing.

Baby Mama brings to mind the ploys used by the woman in Baby Boom to have a child. Despite its predictability, this film works thanks to the fetching performances by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler who have fine-tuned their skills as comedians on TV's Saturday Night Live.


Special DVD features include an alternate ending; deleted scenes; Saturday Night Live: Legacy of Laughter, brought to you by Volkswagen; and "From Conception to Delivery: The Making of Baby Mama."