Up All Night (NBC) - Series Premiere: Synopsis and Review

Update: Together with 'Whitney', 'Up All Night' got picked up by NBC for a full season of 24 episodes.

The next show that premiered in the Fall 2011 TV Season is ‘Up All Night’, a sitcom about parenthood starring Christina Applegate (‘Married With Children’, ‘Samantha Who?’) and Will Arnett (’30 Rock’). Reagan (Applegate), a workaholic, and Chris (Arnett), who works at a law firm, are a couple who never thought they’d even have kids at all. Now, however, they are having their first child, and struggle with their loss of freedom and the lack of sleep.

The series premiere starts off with Reagan taking a pregnancy test, it is obviously their first time taking one because they have no clue whether a smiley face means ‘yay, you’re not pregnant!’ or ‘yay, there’s a baby in there!’.
Nine months later the baby is born; it is a girl and they named her Amy. Together, they have decided that Chris would give up his job at a/the/his law firm to become a stay-at-home dad. Reagan would remain working as a producer of her best friend Ava’s (Maya Rudolph) talkshow. This distribution leads to adjustment problems for both of them. Chris has to get used to staying home all the time and to learn where to find everything in the supermarket. Reagan has to manage her time well; Ava wants her to be at her disposal 24 hours a day, but she needs to spend time at home as well.

‘Up All Night’ has some funny elements in it. The scenes with the baby are usually quite fun, but the scenes at the office lack originality. Ava is a bit over the top, but that might prove to be funny in the future. However, there will need to come some laughs from the talkshow-angle, or at least some other angle, because with just the staying-at-home-with-the-baby-angle this show is not going to last very long.