UP ALL NIGHT
Starring the always lovely and funny Christina Applegate and Arrested Development alum Will Arnett, Up All Night should have been a home run. For a lot of viewers, I'm guessing it absolutely was. It has a great cast and was well made. That said, I am quite happily single and childless and the show's concept held very
little appeal for me and hardly any laughs. Will and Christina brought a lot of warmth and energy to their roles as slightly-bumbling, but adoring new parents, but the proposed hilarity of tending to a crying baby all night was lost on me. I'm sure for people who've been through the trials and tribulations of new parenthood this show was a sheer delight, but for me? Well, honestly, I was incredibly bored. The pilot had its moments, and elicited a few smiles from me, but overall, this just isn't the kind of show I'm going to love, and that's okay. It doesn't make it a bad show just because it's not my kind of show. That said, I'm hearing rumors that Maya Rudolph's character role is being expanded and that Will Arnett's will probably be the one to take a fair bit of the hit. Arnett is a showkiller, to be sure, but I'd still prefer to see more of him than Maya (not that I don't like Maya, but a little goes a long way). In short, this just isn't my cup of tea, which isn't to say that the tea was poorly made. I'll give it another week to branch out in terms of storyline, but if it's still as baby-centric as the pilot, I'm pretty sure I won't last long. You never know though. I quite enjoy Raising Hope, but that has way more to do with Martha Plimpton and Garret Dillahunt than with the baby. Both shows just make me surer and surer that I never ever want to have children. Cautionary tales.Pilot Grade: C- (?)
(I honestly had a hard time assigning a grade because objectively, I could appreciate that it would appeal to a lot of people, but more importantly, it didn't really appeal to me...)
FREE AGENTS
On the other side of the spectrum, we have a fairly horrible show that has a concept that's much more appealing to me, even if the show itself isn't. I didn't hate this one as much as most critics out there, but I didn't much enjoy it either. The show focuses on a man and woman who are both reeling from their past
relationships (a recent divorce for him, a dead fiance for her) and who find each other. On the surface, it sounds pretty decent, but in execution, it was pretty unfortunate. It had a few moments that were charming, but all in all, the show itself seemed to think it was a lot funnier than the viewing audience. The most painfully unfunny scene of the pilot included Hank Azaria's character making up names of sexual positions amid the roaring laughter of his coworkers. Yeah, not that funny. At all, in fact. It wasn't even crude. It was just lame. I spent the better part of the show wishing these actors that I like (or in Anthony Head's case, absolutely LOVE) were in a far better show. Oh, Giles. You can do so much better. Really, the biggest laugh for me was the fact that the female lead opposite Hank Azaria was named Helen. That's kind of sad. Overall, the characters simply weren't very funny or likeable and the chemistry between the two leads was lacking. When a show is based around said chemistry, and said chemistry is lacking, that show is in trouble. I don't really have much desire to get to know these characters better, but I might give it another week just to see if the writers of the show saw what I saw and made some major adjustments. I'm always torn when it comes to a Whedonverse alum finding him/herself in a dud. On the one hand, I want them to succeed, but on the other, rather larger hand, I want their show to tank so they can move on to bigger and better things. Sigh.Pilot Grade: D+
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