The Up All Night Review

Up All Night is an NBC comedy that is one of the many shows that I regularly follow on Thursday night. My wife Elizabeth and I started watching it from the beginning last year because we wanted to see to what extent the show captured reality well or was just another television show whose relevance to the real world was minimal at best.

I suppose that it bears mentioning that the realism of television usually does not faze me at all. I watched multiple seasons of Friends and barely complained that hardly any of the characters could afford the immense apartments in which they were living. This particular show is important to both Elizabeth and I as it is about parents and the experiences of being a parent and raising a baby. Would it be a typical sitcom and be more about the laughs and have nothing to do with the real world?

I would like to illustrate exactly how close the show is to reality with a few examples. In the first example, Christina Applegate’s character of Reagan is watching their daughter and turns her back for what she perceives as only a brief amount of time and when she comes back, there is writing all over the wall. I have caught Chaim about to write on the wall at least twice.

In a second example, Reagan and her husband let their daughter sleep in between us when she is a little sick and this turns into their struggling to get her to sleep anywhere else. We had a similar experience trying to get Chaim to sleep in his own bed, and it wasn’t until we had a proper crib for him (not that his bassinet wasn’t proper, just a bit smaller) that he wasn’t sleeping in between us. On the rare occasion that he does sleep in between us now, I end up waking up a couple of hours later to move him back into his own bed — it is far better for everyone.

In the last example, I would like to point to last week’s episode in which they struggle to find someone to babysit for their daughter and even when they are out and in theory don’t have to worry about anything, they are still concerned with their daughter and wondering why they don’t get more text message updates. The last time that Elizabeth and I went out at night and had a babysitter watch him, we went to see the new Woody Allen movie and as much fun as I had, I was thinking about Chaim for most of the movie and how he was doing. As it turns out, he was given a bath and put to bed more than an hour than we normally would — and he was fine!

I would highly recommend “Up All Night” to any fan of humor, parent or not. It is a half hour of laughs that you can even share with a little one.