I was equal parts interested and wary of NBC’s Up All Night (Wednesdays at 8:00PM). On one hand, I love Will Arnett (even though Running Wilde lacked any real basis in reality and therefore gave me no foundation to stand on while laughing at hijinks) and like Christina Applegate. Plus, I dug the idea of a sitcom based on a shared experience that I now have with the characters. They’re both new parents with the wife working and the dad staying home to watch the baby. My worry was that it would be all corny “Oh man, we NEVER get any sleep anymore,” jokes which seem so obvious and tired (PUN!) that they don’t sound appealing to me right now. Maybe that’s just because Lucy’s been waking up to feed a lot more lately and it hits a little close to home at the moment. Oddly enough, the season premiere didn’t live up to either expectation, but wound up going in a completely different direction.

I caught the first episode last night with my inlaws. We’re on a family vacation in Massachusetts this week, hence the lack of blogging, though I do have some good ideas read to rock once we’re back at home base. Anyway, while I liked Applegate and Arnett together, they came off as pretty one-dimensional in this first episode as it solely revolved around them trying to impress their cool-looking new neighbors and Applegate’s boss, the Oprah-like Maya Rudolph assuming that the baby hated her. The point of all this was for them to reconcile their switch over from hip married couple to boring parents, which was very plainly expressed throughout the episode without much subtext or real emotion. Again, maybe it’s because I’m dealing with things like this now (not that I was ever super cool, but you get what I mean) and it’s very real to me. I can tell you how it all feels and it doesn’t come off as cartoony and jokey, it hits you in the gut. Actually, maybe I will tell you what it feels like in a later post…

Another complaint I had was that all of the secondary characters came off as very one dimensional. I think there’s a lot of potential in Rudolph’s, but there was no depth there this time. The baby wallet stuff was pretty funny though. Then you’ve got the sycophantic assistant, the lame neighbors who don’t actually say anything the whole episode and the super-great nice guy played by Nick Cannon, who was definitely charming, but too nice (who agrees to come over at midnight to watch a baby so you can go over to your neighbor’s party and act like you didn’t call the cops on them?). Oddly enough, the cool new neighbors came off as the most interesting to me because they looked cool, but didn’t seem obsessed with it like Applegate and Arnett. They were just living it, you know? I wouldn’t mind watching THEIR show, actually.

Overall, this first episode felt like a misstep. I think they should have focused more on the parents as real people dealing with their child instead of aging cool kids dealing with age, because at the end of the episode I don’t really care about anyone in the show. And why should I? What was I given to really grab a hold of? With that being said, each character still had a line or two that made me laugh and some interesting moments here and there, just as a whole it felt imbalanced. Maybe if this was the third or fourth episode and I knew these characters a little better, it’d be interesting, but opening your series with a showcase of how vapid and status-conscious your leads are doesn’t seem like a great idea to me. At the end of the day, I’ve only got so much time to watch TV in the evening (we are DVR-less in our house) and I will most likely be jumping over to ABC’s line-up from 8-10PM on Wednesdays because the combination of The Middle, Suburgatory (love the concept, hate the title), Modern Family and Happy Endings is a lot more compelling for me as both a fan of comedy and a parent. But, I’m still rooting for Up All Night. Hopefully it’ll be like Parks & Rec which started of dismally and has since turned into a great series. Fingers crossed.