This week’s episode of Up All Night featured another flagship plot all series must go through. Again, the NBC freshman hit sitcom seems to be pulling out these episodes a little early and having two back-to-back (last week’s “Birth” episode) is a little much, but the show makes it work. This episode brings Reagan’s parents into town, and of course they do not see eye-to-eye. Fox’s Glee did this earlier this season, and the idea has been done dating back all the way to Roseanne and beyond. It’s a classic sitcom ritual that is anything but fresh.
“Parents” starts with Chris sitting at the computer contemplating life when he realizes a magazine subscription expires in 21 years, or as he puts it, only five Olympics away. As Reagan tries to comfort him, they receive a Skype call from her parents. Her whiny tone as she tries to get him to ignore it is ridiculous, and Chris tells her she is acting like a 14-year-old girl. And there we have it: she doesn’t get along with her parents. Shocker.
It turns out Reagan’s mother Angie (Blythe Danner) has written books on child rearing, and her father Dean (Richard Schiff) is a psychiatrist, which makes Chris think he’s able to read people’s minds. Later she goes through great lengths to ensure her parents will not arrive in Los Angeles, but Chris is preoccupied with his looming death. His preoccupation with death is a nice twist that keeps a stale sitcom plot fresh. It’s interesting to see a mixture of clichés working together that somehow makes it seem like we’re not watching an episode that we’ve all seen a thousand times before.
Meanwhile, Dale “that microphone guy” has died at the talk show and Ava, who clearly has no clue who he is, gives a passionate speech which results in the entire crew realizing she doesn’t know who Dale is. They grow upset when she calls him Mike instead of Dale. Resentment among her employees begins to grow, and Ava is oblivious and doesn’t really care because she claims she is bad at names. Her next episode is a disaster when the hairsylist, whom Ava calls Hair, makes her hair look awful, and the cameraman keeps her out of focus and then zooms in on the wall behind her. While this is funny, it’s unrealistic. Of course sitcoms have the license to be absurd, but Up All Night has always kept a sense of realism to its plots. How this storyline caps off is hilarious and shows just how scary/awesome the inside of Ava’s mind must be.
What “Parents” doesn’t do is build enough resentment between Reagan and her mother. Usually it’s clear why a daughter hates her mother on a sitcom, even to the point where the mother becomes annoying. Sure, Angie is a little bothersome, but there is nothing that pushes her over the edge like other shows clearly strive to do. In fact, her father is endearing, and it would be great to see him more often. His scenes with Chris in the second act are honest and touching.
So much could have been done with this episode, but Up All Night remained tame throughout and kept me waiting for the writers to take the next step. What we receive is still better than a lot of the shows that premiered this season, but it wasn’t up to par with the rest of the series so far. The cuteness remained, but “Parents” felt more of a filler episode.