What is going on with Up All Night this season? I loved it to death last season, but so far it’s been terrifyingly flat. Emily Nussbaum, who excites and frustrates me in equal measure - which I guess is the mark of a great critic, or at least one who tweets a lot - said on Twitter last night that “Up All Night has turned into some weird experiment for how low the stakes can be in a comedy.” Which is a weird thing to say in a comedy universe that includes Seinfeld! Still, she’s got a point. I am baffled by why they had Maya Rudolph lose her Oprah-like show, which was both a source of great jokes and opportunities for Christina Applegate’s character, who worked as her producer, to do some good business, but I don’t think that the problem is stakes. I don’t know that comedies need stakes so much; in all honesty, I think one of the biggest problems with recent sitcoms is that they think they need high-stakes situations in order to keep our interest. I would trade Jim and Pam’s marriage for five good Meredith jokes at this point! What they do need are little injections of fun side trips that take us outside the normal setting: Michael Scott dropping a watermelon off the roof, Tracy trying to do a single-shot commercial over and over again, the road trips on How I Met Your Mother, etc. Community gets this to such a degree that their episodes are often nothing but fun side trips! And Up All Night seems to have lost that. We lost Ava’s show and got this weird Poochie of a brother in return. I am horrified that in the off-season they got some really bad notes.
But I am also a little horrified that it might get canceled, because I really identify with the characters. I don’t know that I identify with any single character in particular, but I identify with the ensemble, somehow. I definitely connect pretty hard with Arnett and Applegate’s relationship, and while I can’t nail it down exactly, I know that I see my own relationship mirrored there. So if it got canceled for focusing too much on the relationship, that would mean that my life is too boring for America. Which I guess it is. But still!
