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Up All Night: Series Premiere

By Zack Gutin · September 15, 2011

Up All Night is a show afflicted. Is it writers trying too hard to cram too much into the first episode? Maybe. Is it the fact that the mechanism (the baby) that incites the premise of the show isn’t acknowledged enough? Possibly. Or does the guilt of a problematic pilot rest in the SNL blood-line itself? I say it’s all three.

Created by former SNL writer Emily Spivey and also Executive Produced by both SNL creator Lorne Michaels and Up All Night star, Christina Applegate, who co-stars with Will Arnett, husband of former SNL actress Amy Poehler, and former SNL actress Maya Rudolph, the SNL blood clearly runs deep in and it shows. Up All Night is chock-filled with funny dialogue and has a decent batting average with subsequent laughs, but ultimately struggles to find its strong points in this pilot episode.

Throughout the first two acts of the show, while the funny was coming out little by little, the whole time something felt like it was missing.  Not gone forever, just absent.  I couldn’t put my finger on what it was at first.  It wasn’t until the third act, when all of a sudden it returned, that I realized WHAT had been missing.  The baby!  While we get a funny foul-mouthed interaction with the new baby in the teaser, then a later father-daughter moment in the first act, we had no significant experience… no real struggle with the child itself…. Until the third act, when we have a really funny diaper-change battle and sweet bonding moment.

The joke writing and characterization are sharp here, but the relationships come off clunky, specifically the relationship between Applegate’s character and her work.  Applegate’s interactions with her boss, played by Rudolph, whose odd-ball “Oprah”-like character (Rudolph basically utilizes her Oprah impression from SNL) is deployed to distract us from the exposition-loaded conversation.  Later, when she strangely stops by Applegate and Arnett’s home to bring them a gift, the interaction could not seem more uncomfortable as Arnett and Rudolph hardly communicate. 

I might have blamed it on Rudolph’s character as the constant in this formula, but the truth is that a similar odd, confusing dynamic exists at the office where they work.  Colleagues, played by mere extras, hardly react to group announcements about a team “cleanse” and its potentially harmful ramifications (which is actually pretty funny, but seemed to misfire because of the other non-verbal reactions).  One exchange after the next felt like going for a walk on a nice day and tripping on a raised sidewalk every five feet – it forces you to forget how enjoyable it should be!

Finally, in the third act, we start to spend some time with the baby.  Of course, this interaction brings out the heart of the episode and the sidewalk smoothes out.  The jokes get funnier, finally WATCHING them struggle, not just talking about it.  We are not with the baby at work, while getting gifts from our boss, playing video games or bitching about how hard having the baby is (but again, not yet showing it).  Obviously, these other aspects of the character’s lives are pertinent to the premise, but we need to see the struggle with the baby first for those other aspects to seem so difficult.

Ultimately, the work life dynamic of this show needs retooling, at least based off this pilot.  It is distracting, odd, forced and not relatable.  Spivey is aiming to tell the tale of “behind the scenes of a TV series…” and how a new mom must readjust her personal and professional life.  However, a character equivalent to Oprah’s assistant is not the world Spivey knows or one most people know (or care about for that matter).  Most people don’t know, or really care, about the “behind the scenes of a TV series” for a female comedy writer – but “30 Rock” works because Fey DOES know that world (Sorkin didn’t either), inside and out, well enough to always find the funny.  Spivey’s heartfelt show might benefit from a more relatable career for her main character – at least for her audience to better relate to.   It wouldn’t be too hard of a change to eventually drive towards… just cancel that fake “Oprah” show.  Rudolph’s character could even follow Applegate into another career afterwards.

Again, this was just a pilot.  Sometimes pilots just simply don’t represent the bigger picture.  And the bigger picture here is bright.  The series seems to have found it’s heart by the end of the episode and continued movement in that direction will benefit it.  Also, sometimes pilots have “raised sidewalks” because of the tendency to want to pipe so much exposition into one episode, to introduce your audience to all the potentially funny points of your show.   But sometimes, that just isn’t necessary.  Let’s see if they can smooth out the sidewalk up ahead throughout the first full season.