Review – Up All Night

Up All Night – NBC – 8:00/7:00pm Wednesday – USA

NBC are a network in trouble; they’ve struggled in the ratings since, oh let’s say, Friends left the air and things don’t look to be getting any better any time soon. The only area where NBC has been able to find a slither of success is during their Thursday night comedy line-up. The comedy block of Community, Parks & Recreation, The Office and 30 Rock have not only been dependable awards bait, but they’re loved by critics and have a solid, if not very large, audience who are devoted to them. It makes perfect sense that NBC would try their hand at launching another night of comedy, however it makes no sense that they’re trying to launch a Wednesday night comedy block on the back of a weak sauce sitcom like Up All Night.

Up All Night features three genuine stars in Christina Applegate, Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph. Arnett and Applegate play Chris and Regan a pair of new parents who used to enjoy a party lifestyle before their baby came along. Maya Rudolph plays Ava, star of an Oprah like show titled, funnily enough, Ava. Regan works for Ava, and when she returns to work Chris gets to stay home and look after the adorable baby. Somebody at NBC obviously spent a lot of time watching Raising Hope last season and really wanted their own ‘adorable baby raised by less than responsible parents’ sitcom. Raising Hope eventually found its feet after a shaky start, and maybe Up All Night just needs some time to figure out what works and what doesn’t because at the moment this is one comedy that forgets to include anything resembling jokes.

Applegate and Arnett are always enjoyable to watch, even when they’re appearing in shows that aren’t all that good, as anybody who stuck with Samantha Who? and Running Wilde would already be well aware. Unfortunately this time out they’re stuck in a comedy that doesn’t seem too interested in anything resembling comedy. Up All Night sleepily moves from one scene to the next forgetting to include any jokes. If there are any laughs to be found, and I tried my damndest to look for them, they come only from the performances which do their best with literally no material. Rudolph is a talented comic actress when she’s reigned in, but somebody on the set of Up All Night told her ‘louder, bigger and with more of your patented bad singing’. With no direction the three stars are giving performances that just wander off looking for punchlines that never arrive.

There isn’t so much a plot to Up All Night as there is a vague idea about two former hard party-goers having a kid and then… look at the adorable kid! There’s a running joke about the pair cussing around their kid. They’ll say things like ‘so BLEEPing beautiful!’ and it will actually be bleeped, and then they’ll say ‘we shouldn’t cuss around our child’ and then they’ll say something like ‘but BLEEP she’s beautiful’. It’s unclear where the joke is – is it in the loud bleep? Is it that they swear around a baby? Is it that they can’t stop swearing around a baby even though they’ve just decided not to swear? There are a lot of these sort of “jokes” in Up All Night, where not even the stars of the show seem to get where the laughter should be coming from.

Up All Night is one of those bizarre sitcoms that manage to contain no laughs whatsoever but are somehow not unpleasant to watch. Applegate can be whiny at times, and Rudolph is giving an increasingly hammy performance, but there’s nothing openly detestable about any of this. This show is just there, blandly drifting by until something else comes on the television. Maybe this isn’t a sitcom at all, maybe it’s a show designed to lull babies to sleep. Either way, there isn’t a lot to laugh at in Up All Night, but with that said this might be a case where the ‘three episode rule’ gets pulled out. Sitcoms are notorious for taking a while to find their voice, and simply because Up All Night isn’t wholly unpleasant just simply unfunny it might be worth trying another couple of episodes before giving up on it completely. The worst that could happen is that you drift off to sleep and get a nice half hour nap; actually that should be the tagline: ‘Up All Night? – enjoy your nap’.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad