How To Get Your TV Fix This Summer (Without Watching True Blood

A thoughtfully funny priest, a bumbling spy and a downright Biblical clash of Kings provide a great antidote to vampires and werewolves.

Clockwise from top left: Jay Harrington and Portia de Rossi in Better Off Ted; Chris Egan in Kings; Jude Wright and Darren Boyd in Spy; and Tom Hollander in Rev.

With May sweeps a distant memory and early-summer series like Game of Thrones already finished, summer TV epitomizes Minow's famous "vast wasteland." Although many cable networks are starting to challenge traditional scheduling, the current television landscape consists mostly of reruns, reality series and True Blood. Even Doctor Who, normally a godsend for those of us who prefer quality programming to baking on the beach (not everyone tans, and not all of us enjoy slathering on SPF 1500 and donning a hat just so we can watch other people brown) has taken an extended hiatus, and won't be returning until an unspecified date in the fall.

Luckily, we live in an age of streaming video and HD laptop displays, which means that a world of TV is sitting at our fingertips, waiting for us to dispel the summer doldrums and dive right in. If you find yourself with some extra time between barbecues and beach parties, these five series are well worth your time and energy (and, in some cases, the cost of an Amazon Prime subscription).

Spy

Who should watch: Anyone who misses the covert ops shenanigans of Archer and adores Community's genre parodies.

Available on: Hulu

Hulu has become a great source of less-known British television, and Spy is one of the streaming service's best offerings. The show's protagonist, Tim (Darren Boyd), is a middle-aged loser working in an electronics store and fighting for the love (and custody rights) of his precocious, witheringly critical son Marcus (Jude Wright) when he stumbles into the wrong civil service exam and ends up as an MI6 agent. Spy combines the best elements of several shows - the set-up is pure Chuck, the portrayal of MI6 is right out of the Archer playbook, and later episodes have Marcus starring in parodies of gangster movies and Westerns that could have teleported in from Community - but the show makes them its own. Spy features a great cast of supporting characters (I'm a particular fan of Mathew Baynton's Chris), but the whole enterprise is anchored by the prickly, hilarious, often cruel and occasionally sweet relationship between Tim and Marcus, whose odd couple banter is like nothing else on TV.

THAT Scene: The men of Up All Night bring the funny

THAT Scene is a recurring feature that takes a closer look at a single scene that exemplifies a particular show, theme or moment in time. The scene might be good or bad, but it will always be memorable and worth talking about.

Many of the best sitcoms, both current and past, thrive on the strength of their ensembles. Happy Endings, Arrested Development, Cheers and Seinfeld are some of the best-known examples of half-hour comedies that work the best when they put their large casts in the same place and let them bounce them off one another.

Up All Night doesn't work the same way. The core ensemble of Will Arnett, Christina Applegate and Maya Rudolph is half the size of Community's or Friends' six- and seven-person casts. The show has also been hit-or-miss at developing its secondary characters; for every Missy or Kevin there's a Luke or B-Ro who doesn't quite fit. That alone makes today's scene - which comes from the show's season finale, "The Proposals" - unique; not only does it not feature Reagan or Ava, but it succeeds on the chemistry between Chris and two recurring characters, the aforementioned Kevin (Jason Lee) and Chris Diamantopoulous' amazing Julian.

NBC is picking up new shows left and right (including what looks like The Hunger Games: The TV Series)

Perpetually last-place network NBC went on a shopping spree yesterday, picking up six new series for the 2012 season. One of those series, the J.J. Abrams-produced post-apocalyptic thriller Revolution, look like a reasonably promising sci-fi adventure (although that could just be because I'm a sucker for a good apocalypse). It also looks suspiciously like a certain smash hit young-adult book (and film) series, at least as evidenced by the promotional picture below (via Vulture):

I mean, the girl in the middle is wearing Katniss Everdeen's exact hunting jacket, and the guy on the left  in the white shirt is a dead ringer for Peeta Mellark. Not to mention that all of them are holding bows (which, between The Hunger Games, The Avengers and Pixar's upcoming Brave, are really having a moment.)

In other NBC pickup news: Vulture reported that the poor, bedraggled peacock has decided to pull itself out its ratings slump with the Ryan Murphy sitcom The New Normal (it worked for FOX!); the Matthew Perry-starring series Go On; and Save Me, starring Anne Heche, which is just sort of baffling. Then, as if fans of 30 Rock, Community, Up All Night and Parks & Recreation weren't sweating enough, the network also greenlit 1600 Penn, a White House-set family comedy starring Bill Pullman and Jenna Elfman, and Animal Practice, which TVLine described as a workplace comedy about "a House-like veterinarian who loves animals but usually hates their owners."

With the exception of Revolution - which could take Fringe's place as the critically-adored-yet-ratings-challenged science fiction series when the former ends its run after a thirteen-episode fifth season - none of these look terribly promising. The New Normal has the double advantage of Ellen Barkin and The Book of Mormon's Andrew Rannells, but it also has the black hole of awful that is Ryan Murphy. Mr. Sunshine and Studio 60 proved that Matthew Perry can't really carry a show on his own. 1600 Penn contains another Book of Mormon alum, Josh Gad, but Pullman and Elfman are pretty far past their primes by this point. As for Save Me and Animal Practice; I have no words. None whatsoever.

NBC Thursday Night Recap: or, Conceptual, Tired and Sweet

Clockwise from top left: Tina Fey and Jane Krakowski in "Nothing Left to Lose"; Maya Rudolph and Megan
Mullaly in "Hey Jealousy"; Krakowski; Donald Glover and Danny Pudi in "Pillows and Blankets"; Chevy
Chase as the Pillow Man in "Pillows and Blankets."

This recap is meant to be read in the reassuring but powerful voice of a documentary narrator. Morgan Freeman, maybe. Or that guy from The Cape. He seems like he's pretty good at this type of thing.

It is a Thursday night on NBC. The network is desperate for higher ratings, as it is consistently beaten by the Spanish-language network Univision. It responds by airing a high-concept episode based on PBS documentaries; a comedy that no one thought would last more than one season that has hung on for six; and a series starring an actor best known for a critically acclaimed, prematurely cancelled sitcom. What could go wrong?

8:00 p.m., ET.

Community airs an episode about the dissolution of the show's most innocent, joyous friendship, structured as a Ken Burns documentary about a campus-wide pillow fight. The episode brilliantly captures the sadness of a friendship that will never be the same again, while also capturing the foibles of the Greendale study group with amusing efficiency.

Narrator: Troy would later say of the war, "It was awesome. But, it wasn't?"

Narrator: Unfortunately for Britta, and millions of photographers like her, just because something is in black and white doesn't mean it's good. 

Jeff: Guys, I wasn't going to show this to anyone, but it's pretty profound, I kind of nailed it.

"Pillows and Blankets," however, is not content with merely exploring, with great precision, the subtleties of friendship and the idiosyncrasies of its characters. It also gives the viewer a chilling glimpse of a future in which our exploits are not documented by beautifully written prose and the detailed descriptions of historians, but by text messages and Facebook status updates.

It's really sad to be NBC right now

Big Brother may be watching you, but he sure as hell isn't watching NBC.

Seriously, it is really, really sad to be NBC right now, although that can only mean good things for Community (via Splitsider):

These last couple of weeks have been pretty great for Community, which saw its ratings shoot up higher than ever before. But alas, what goes up, must come down — at least on NBC. Last night's (really great) episode lost a whole lot of last week's audience, hitting a season-low of a 1.3 rating and 3.1 million viewers. But hey, it could be worse for our friends from Greendale: every NBC show hit its season low last night, meaning Community still won the night for the peacock. And it's kind of tough to justify giving the axe to Community for a 1.3 when 30 Rock had a 1.2 and Up All Night had a 1.1 (The Office was a repeat, yet again). Silver linings?

I mean, those ratings are just sad. Think of it this way; if Fringe was on NBC Thursdays, it would be solidly in the middle of the ratings heap. The Vampire Diaries, which airs on perennial ratings loser The CW, would have tied Up All Night. Rules of Engagement, which I continually forget is actually a show, got three times the viewers that 30 Rock did.

On the bright side, this is probably good news for Community, because NBC can't fire the study group without canceling a good chunk of their other programming. Of course, it's also looking increasingly likely that the network will just go bankrupt and stop broadcasting. Maybe Subway will be willing to give them some financial support...

Can we stop pretending that women only have female friends?

30 Rock's Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy (courtesy of E! Online) and Up All Night's Chris, Reagan and Ava (courtesy
of Max Updates).

Katie Stroh at TVSquad recently published a piece about the lack of "genuine" female friendships on television. Stroh claims that, since Sex and the City and Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air, "there's an undeniably enormous gap between the number of shows with female characters whose lives revolve primarily around men and shows that work the other way around." The only representation of a female friendship that Stroh finds compelling is Leslie (Amy Poehler) and Ann (Rashida Jones) on Parks and Recreation.

Stroh makes some interesting points. She notes that many female friendships on television are defined by "petty backstabbing and competitive cattiness," and also points out that, for all the talk of this season being the year of women on TV, many of the new, female-centric TV shows don't present a good portrait of women's friendships (although I would disagree with her claim about 2 Broke Girls, since the central female friendship is about the only thing it has going for it.) Stroh's argument, however, has two major problems.

The first is her over-reliance on the Bechdel Test. The test is an interesting metric, but its existence at this point is really about shock value. As TV Tropes points out, "A movie can easily pass the Bechdel Test and still be incredibly misogynistic. Conversely, it's also possible for a story to fail the test and still be strongly feminist in other ways." The problem here is that Stroh (and she's hardly alone in this), cites the Bechdel test like its the only metric available for determining feminism. Stroh describes the test as a method of measuring whether "female characters have lives and relationships that don't primarily deal with the men around them." In doing so, she not only leaves out a lot of relevant information about the Bechdel Test itself, but is also working off the assumption that women are only friends with other women.

NBC's casts band together in a fantastic Super Bowl Promo

Suppose you're an actor from a show on a network whose ratings are tanking faster than the GOP's enthusiasm for Newt Gingrich. Suppose that your network has one property - NFL Football - that's keeping it afloat enough that your show can continue, even though there are less people in your audience than cast members on your show. You would want to celebrate that event, wouldn't you? Well, if you are on an NBC series, you would, and you would do it with song and dance.

This promo, like so many NBC productions, is weird, fantastic, and totally alienating to its target demographic. I'm prepared to assume that there is not a huge overlap between people who enjoy sharp, self-deprecating parodies of famous Broadway numbers and people who want to watch Tom Brady either crush or get crushed by the Giants. (And no, liking the Family Guy "Shipoopie" number doesn't put you in the first category.) There are moments when NBC seems more like a niche cable network than a big four station, and at this point they should probably just embrace that.

It's also a little puzzling that the cast of Community plays such a prominent role, given the show's recent disappearance from the primetime lineup. Maybe the screen time given to the adorable, talented cast, in combination with a brief, listless shot of the leads from Are You There, Chelsea? and Whitney (seriously, the gang from SVU was having more fun), is a sign that the study group is poised to return to the airwaves. Oh, and did anyone else find it weird that the only people who didn't sing were the successful, chart-topping singers on The Voice's judges panel? And that, right after Jenna Maroney and Jack Donaghy sang their lines celebrating mediocrity, the cast of Smash was introduced?

Besides a few perplexing bits, however, the ad was great fun. The stars of Up All Night and Parks and Recreation were almost as charming as the Community cast, and it was nice to see the hosts of Today perform with their late-night antithesis, the cast of Saturday Night Live. I'm hoping that Katrina Bowden's appearance as the scantily-clad Cerie is a sign of her imminent return to 30 Rock, because I was just wondering where she had gone. And the tag, starring a tap-dancing Jimmy Fallon, was a lovely ending. Here's hoping that next year he'll make it in time.

It's Thanksgiving, so let's give thanks (for TV)!

Photo courtesy of televisionaryblog.com.

It might not seem like there's much to be thankful for on TV right now, what with the benching of Community, the smaller episode order for Cougartown, and the continued existence of two (!) incoherent Ryan Murphy shows that somehow attract enormous ratings. But, in the spirit of the holiday, I found some things in the land of television for which I am truly grateful.

The return of Arrested Development


It's really happening, people. Netflix has officially picked up a mini-season (nine or ten episodes) of everyone's favorite, brilliant-but-cancelled show to air in early 2013, hopefully followed by a movie! Our Bluths have been saved at last!

30 Rock is coming back!


The silver lining in the sad Community cloud is the return of 30 Rock to the airwaves in January. I've missed my Liz Lemon, and while I certainly would have preferred that Liz, Jack, Tracy, Jenna and co. return by way of the cancellation of Whitney, I'll take what I can get to have them on the airwaves again.

A string of fantastic Fringe and Community episodes


If Community and Fringe are in their final seasons (god forbid), at least they both went down in a blaze of creative glory. Episodes like Fringe's "One Night in October," "And Those We Left Behind" and "Wallflower" were gorgeous, twisty and beautifully resonant pieces of storytelling, while Community knocked it out of the park with "Competitive Ecology," "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux" and what may be the show's best half-hour ever, "Remedial Chaos Theory." Plus, this happened.

The Vampire Diaries is on the CW


As you are probably all aware, TVD is soapy, inventive, fast-paced and just plain fun. Along with Fringe and Community, it's my favorite show on TV. (If you watch, you understand why, and if you don't watch, don't judge.) Luckily, while the series gets ratings that would be abysmal by any other network's standards (yes, even NBC's), it airs on the CW, a network that has greenlit nine seasons of One Tree Hill. It's nice to know that at least one of my shows will be airing doppelganger hijinks and jaw-dropping twists for years to come.

Game of Thrones winning Emmys, and generally being awesome


HBO's lavish, nuanced, dark and totally fantastic adaptation of George R.R. Martin's novels was a great example of a fantasy epic done right. HBO managed to really nail a complex fantasy epic and show the world that fantasy isn't just for nerds anymore, just as Battlestar Galactica and Fringe did for science fiction. Peter Dinklage's well-deserved Emmy for his portrayal of Tyrion Lannister was just icing on the cake. Now, can we work on getting one of those winged statuettes for Emilia Clarke?

Up All Night: a show that deserves Will Arnett


We all love GOB Bluth and Devon Banks, but nobody liked Running Wilde. So it's nice to see Will Artnett doing excellent work on Up All Night alongside fellow comedy stars Christina Applegate and Maya Rudolph. Who knew that the man known for over-the-top craziness could be such a steady, loving and totally hilarious dad?

"Parents" just don't understand*

Blythe Danner and Richard Schiff as Reagan's parents in "Parents."

Up All Night started out promising, but a little rough. The show hadn't quite figured out what tone it wanted to strike, veering between the realism of Reagan (Christina Applegate) and Chris (Will Arnett) learning how to cope with parenthood and the zany, 30 Rock-esque antics of Maya Rudolph's Ava. Last night's "Parents" still suffered a bit from sudden shifts in tone but, despite a few flat moments in the Ava storyline, the episode was a great example of how the series is coming into its own.

"Parents" was excellent in large part because the episode dealt with a relatable subject: the tense, regressive relationships that often spring up between parents and their adult children. Tension between parents and children is hardly something new on TV - I talked recently about the toxic parents of The Big Bang Theory - but Up All Night, as usual, presented a lovely, nuanced portrayal of Reagan's relationship with her mother Angie (Blythe Danner). Watching Reagan act like a teenager whenever her mother appeared was not only funny, but an honest depiction recognizable by anyone who has been held to a curfew when home from college. Reagan diving behind the couch and sobbing into a pillow that no one understands her were hilarious, but they were also instantly identifiable to anyone who has been in a similar situation.

It helped that Danner's portrayal of Angie showed that she was a problematic woman without being unsympathetic. The character could have been Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, but rather than playing her as an ice queen Danner chose to play her as a somewhat selfish and pompous, but still caring, mother. It helped that her relationship with her husband, Richard Schiff's Dean, was warm and relatable. Dean's gentle ribbing of his wife's continued insistence that the party thrown for her book release was "embarassing" was a beautiful example of the way this show understands the interaction between long-term couples. This understanding comes up in Chris and Reagan's relationship as well. The moment when Chris points out to Reagan that the reason no one understands her is because she's talking into a pillow is both funny and comforting, showing the ease of the couple's relationship and the way they rely on each other.

My favorite moment in the episode, however, had nothing to do with either Reagan or Angie. That's not because I didn't love their character arc, but because Arnett and Schiff did such a beautiful job with the scene where Chris confides in Dean about his newfound fear of death (the result of an expiration date on a lifetime subscription to Sports Illustrated). Dean, a therapist, doesn't try to counsel Chris or talk him out of his fear. Instead, he opens up and, in a lovely moment of catharsis for both characters, confesses that death terrifies him, and reveals his solution: alcohol. The scene is played for laughs, but neither Arnett nor Schiff goes over-the-top with their performances, imbuing the moment with a real poignancy.

As usual, the rough spots in the episode were centered around Ava. Her scenes weren't all bad - in particular, her reminder to Reagan that her mother could be a lot worse was great, and Rudolph's delivery sold the line about her mother's partner, a jazz drummer called the Captain - but her complete inability to remember anything about her crew seemed overly detached, even for Ava. Dale's death montage was certainly funny, with its repetition of the one picture of the dearly departed sound technician and shots of his W-4 form, but Ava's insistence on singing over the montage seemed oddly tone-deaf (figuratively, not literally). "Parents" showcased how well the show can mix humor with realism; if only it could figure out how to mix Chris and Reagan with Ava.

*I apologize for the forced Will Smith reference. It's late, and it just happened that way.

Would the cancellation of "Whitney" be such a terrible thing?

Whitney Cummings and Chris D'Ella in NBC's Whitney. Photo courtesy of daemonstv.com.

Yael Cohen at The Daily Beast recently took it upon herself to argue that Whitney Cumming's eponymous NBC sitcom represents a shift in the world of female stand-up comedy; namely, that Cummings can break down the barriers that keep skinny, long-legged, hot women from pursuing a career in an industry dominated by men, unattractive women and lesbians. If Cohen is right, Cumming's success onscreen (she's also a creator of CBS's Two Broke Girls, but behind-the-scenes work apparently doesn't count) could pave the way for the poor, disenfranchised hot girls who just want to do stand-up comedy, but who haven't been given the chance.

That might sound a little harsh, but I've always had a problem with attractive female actresses and comedians complaining that their looks prevent people from taking them seriously, despite a multitude of studies showing that attractive people earn more money, are smarter, and are happier than their less attractive counterparts. In a looks-obsessed culture like Hollywood, it seems even more ridiculous to argue that a woman who looks like Cummings is put at a disadvantage because of her beauty. Cohen, of course, has an explanation for this that takes her argument from questionable to actually offensive. She quotes Dave Rath, a (male) comedy manager, saying "So when a hot girl goes on stage all the guys want to be with her and all the women are like, why is my boyfriend looking at her that way? So the audience was always put off a little bit by attractive women."

Rath's explanation, and by extension Cohen's, hinges on the idea that women are jealous shrews who can't handle the presence of an another attractive woman, much less an attractive woman who is also funny. (To her credit, Cummings contradicts Rath, saying "Whereas I used to think that looking pretty or sexy would alienate women, now it's the opposite. Now I feel like when I embrace my femininity, it makes women relate to me more, because they go 'Oh, she's just like me, she puts on makeup, she tries to look cute...'") The bigger problem here, however, stems from another one of Rath's words of wisdom: "[Comedy] is about vulnerability, people have to identify with those things and that's what everybody is laughing it." The audience has to identify with the person onstage and their problems in order to find that person funny, and most women just do not look like Whitney Cummings (or similarly attractive comics Sarah Silverman and Chelsea Handler).

Of course, the fact that Cummings is hotter than most women doesn't mean we can't sympathize with her. I can sympathize with Liz Lemon just fine, and Tina Fey is nothing if not good-looking. The problem is that 30 Rock is a quick, well-written show and Whitney just isn't. I watched the pilot episode of Whitney, and it wasn't Cumming's looks that kept me from laughing at the show; it was the way the half-hour was devoid of any originality and simply rehashed the same tired jokes about couples who don't have sex enough and unreliable men. Whitney could have been a smart, incisive look at a part of our society that doesn't get a lot of screen time - committed couples who, for whatever reason, choose to remain unmarried - in the vein of this fall's best new comedies Up All Night and 2 Broke Girls. Instead, the jokes are straight out of a King of Queens rerun, and the writers fall back on the old romantic comedy cliche of making the gorgeous Cummings more vulnerable by making her socially inept. (Seriously, who sees a three-tiered display of cupcakes at a wedding reception and doesn't realize that those cupcakes are the trendy wedding cake?)

Cohen concludes her piece by saying that Whitney's failure would signal to the television industry that "audiences aren't ready for a rom-com sitcom centered around a good-looking female standup." Whitney has a good shot at survival - it is on NBC, after all, a network that tolerates low ratings because it's too busy circling the drain to worry about them - but its cancellation shouldn't mean that audiences can't handle a good-looking female standup. It means that audiences are discerning enough to reject a pile of week-old leftovers dressed up with a sprig of parsley to make them look "fresh." If you want to support Cummings, watch the very funny 2 Broke Girls and root for Kat Dennings, a female protagonist who is refreshingly normal-looking while still being pretty damn hot. That is the kind of barrier-breaking television that I want to see.

Review: "Up All Night"

Christina Applegate and Will Arnett in Up All Night. Photo courtesy of tv.com.

Up All Night was, as you may recall, one of the new shows that I was most excited to watch this fall. It has a killer cast - Christina Applegate, Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph - and, based on the early trailer released during the upfronts, it managed to be funny while also being honest about the struggles of being a new parent. Having now seen the first episode, which aired Wednesday night on NBC, I still see a lot of potential in the show. There are, however, a few kinks that need to be worked out.

Let's start with the good. Applegate and Arnett give excellent, likable, grounded performances as Reagan and Chris, new parents who are struggling to balance jobs with their new baby while denying that they can't party like they used to. Arnett in particular gives a charming performance that, unlike so many of his great past roles (GOB Bluth and Devon Banks, to be precise), eschews over-the-top caricature in favor of a realistic portrait of a new stay-at-home father coming to grips with his obligations.

This isn't to say that the show is unfunny. It's definitely funny, although I found few laugh-out-loud moments and more sly, chuckle-inducing humor (this could be due to the fact that many of the pilot's best jokes were in the trailer that I had already seen). One of the funniest moments came when Chris, on a desperate search to find normal cheese, as opposed to "that fancy cheese over by the salad bar," happens upon an old lady who wants to tell him how cute his baby is. Twice. The fact that this innocent woman has "come after" baby Amy more than once sends Chris into a hilarious and believable spiral of paranoia about his child's well-being. Maybe it's just the fact that I grew up with an overprotective mother (hi Mom!), but this scene rang particularly true to me.

Some of the best scenes of the pilot, however, weren't really about baby Amy at all. They were about the  struggles that Chris and Reagan face as later-in-life parents, both of whom have successful careers, who are suddenly forced to face the fact that their entire life is about to change. To me, the character's ages really puts a fresh spin on what could be a fairly standard series about coping with a new baby. Chris and Reagan are very modern parents; they've been married for seven years in the pilot episode, they both already have fulfilling lives, and they still love to party. Their decision (or not - the first scene of the pilot shows Reagan taking a pregnancy test, but we don't really get a sense of whether the baby was planned) to have a baby at this time in their lives is an increasingly common one in a world where many people spend years getting advanced degrees and finding success in their careers before deciding to have children.

To me, Chris and Reagan are symbolic of the sort of delayed adulthood that is common these days (and I'm not criticizing - my fiance and I are both eagerly putting off full adulthood by getting advanced degrees - a trait that sets them apart from the previous generation of television parents. Their delayed adulthood also explains a scene that, I suspect, might strike some in the audience as an example of very bad parenting. On their anniversary, Chris and Reagan end up going out late, getting drunk and singing karaoke, only to wake up the next morning with hangovers and a crying baby in the next room. This is the sort of behavior that, in the different context, would come off as negligent; here, however, it serves as an example of the kind of sacrifices that new parents have to make in order to raise a child. The inane fight that Reagan and Chris have in the same scene is similarly realistic, and allows the show to express, through Chris, the anxiety that someone with a career can have when they leave to take care of a child.

This kind of fine-grained realism, however, is shattered in any scenes that involve Maya Rudolph's Ava. Part of the problem seems to be that Rudolph's character was originally conceived as a publicist rather than a Tyra-esque talk show host, and the quick retooling of the pilot allowed for cracks in the scenes involving Ava's talk show. The bigger problem, however, is that Rudolph's scenes play like they're from a completely different show - their aesthetic is the cartoonish surreality of 30 Rock rather than the realism of the other two-thirds of the episode. The thing is, Rudolph is a wonderful naturalistic actress - see Away We Go if you don't believe me - who has clearly been directed here to behave like one of her SNL characters rather than a real human being. Ava's cartoonish, party-all-the-time vibe makes her a counterpoint to Chris and Reagan's new life, but her diva antics also make it difficult to understand why Reagan is such a close friend of hers. I would like to see the writers humanize Ava by delving into her friendship with Reagan and allowing Rudolph to take her performance down a notch.

Up All Night has the makings of an excellent, realistic-yet-comic look at a subset of parents that hasn't been thoroughly explored in popular culture: older, married couples who are firmly established in their "adult" lives without really being adults, and who find that parenthood completely changes their lives by, in some way, forcing them to finally grow up. The show needs to retool the talk-show portions of the story, and add its very realistic perspective to that underdeveloped story thread. The tension between parents and their childless friends is a very interesting one to explore, and if Up All Night can convincingly portray that tension, it could become a great show instead of a merely interesting one: a Modern Family for the almost-adult set.