Up All Night.
It's a new sit-com on NBC. It's about a husband and a wife - a working mom - who have a baby in early-middle-age. When we saw the previews for this show, the hubby and I thought that we had to watch it. We were primed to watch it; it seemed tailor made for us. So we programmed the DVR.
I should explain that we really do not watch serialized television shows. We watch Pawn Stars. We watch This Old House and America's Test Kitchen. We watch Top Chef. We watch the news. But shows that pretend towards offering characters and plots, we don't watch those.
Alas, the show is, so far, pretty disappointing.
Up All Night is not about what it is like for working professionals to have a baby. This show is about what it's like for middle-aged adolescents to have a baby. Let me explain.
We naturally thought the show's title referred to being up all night with the baby. And I supposed, it does that, but the pilot episode of the show reveals that "up all night" also refers to these characters' party past. The episode features a scene in which the mom and dad call a babysitter at the last minute and then go out on the town for a night-long bacchanalia. The next you see of them, they are hung over and the child is crying for a diaper change. How did they get a babysitter at the last minute? And what babysitter, other than perhaps a relative, is willing to stay the night while mom and dad sing Karaoke and do Jager shots 'til the wee hours? And when the two inebriates arrived home, did the babysitter just leave them there to drunkenly care for the baby?
Here's the irony: We watched this episode at four in the morning after our son woke us up crying with an ear infection. We sat in the twilight of the flickering television, mouths slightly agape in disgusted disbelief. There was no evidence in this episode that these people have ever been awakened at night by their child. Indeed, the child seemed to be little more than a plot device there to inconvenience these two incredibly cool people and a prop around which endearing moments could occur at the close of the show.
The pilot episode also features a stay-at-home dad playing video games and talking on the phone with his other stay-at-home-dad friend. Do any of the writers have children? This man does not have time to play and chat on the phone. Here's what TV-dad's real day would be like: baby cries, feed baby, change baby, baby still cries, rock baby, put baby in swing, feed baby again, change baby, baby finally falls asleep, dad sits down with a cup of coffee, baby starts crying again. Repeat.
And it's not as if Hollywood doesn't know how to make a program about a baby. The movie Three Men and a Baby is really about the baby: Peeing all over the bed. Endless puking. Ceaseless, inconsolable crying. Confusion over formula, bottles, nipples, and types of diapers. Holding down a job while caring for an infant. Reading to the baby. Cuddling the baby. Playing with the baby. Singing the baby to sleep. I'm not asking that Up All Night be the twenty-first century Three Men and a Baby for TV. I just pose that a show whose premise is the trials and travails of new parenthood should probably feature the baby in more than background shots.
Hubby swore off Up All Night after the first viewing. I decided to watch the another episode. This episode began with a whoops-we-forgot-the-baby scene in which mom and dad pack their too-small car with all their beach gear and forget to leave room for the baby. Whoopsie! The episode's theme was how uncool it is to have to buy a family car and how Ma and Pa Coolness don't want to be like their nerdy neighbors walking around with the Baby Bjorn. But they will do it, they will self-consciously sacrifice their cool, for the sake of the child. (Except they didn't! Because they got a custom paint job on the SUV! So they're still cooler than the Weirdlys down the street!)
Without even addressing how the lavish lifestyle lived by these characters does not even come close to approximating your average American's (even your average upper-middle class American's) experience, this show is unrealistic. It shows you the sort of parent that does not exist. Parents do not self-consciously relinquish their coolness for the sake of the kids. Any pretension to hipness melts away with your child's first breath. That's normal. That's what's real. You do not even give your cool rep a second thought and you never miss it. There's comedy there too, but maybe it's more subtle, more difficult to achieve.
I must confess, that the third episode we watched -- yes, we watched a third episode -- seemed to hold a glimmer of promise. The latest episode's storyline addressed the angst of a working mom who feels the very real tug of work versus family. She finds her boss irritated with her commitment to her family and she questions whether her work is having a negative impact on her child. There's even a little hint of the passive aggressivity that is the hallmark of the Mommy Wars. But, it's all neatly resolved at the end with the violent destruction of a stroller and a Bangles song. (Still so cool.) I'm still not impressed, but, I guess, for the sake of my latent desire to see my circumstances depicted on the television, I will keep watching for now. If nothing else, it'll be something to watch the next time I'm up all night with The Boy.
