ABC's new pregnancy-comedy miscarries
The new ABC pregnancy comedy, “Notes from the Underbelly,” looked like it was written for my friends and me. As soon as we turned 30 last year, I felt like we were sucked into this time warp that aged us into a new demographic universe. My married friends started breeding like an alarm had gone off, and even the unmarried and uninseminated among us suddenly found ourselves enthusiastically sharing maternity tips and childcare advice. Truthfully, I’m so far away from being a mother, I’m not even in the same prefecture as pregnant –- and yet I’ve had many long conversations with girlfriends about how we’re going to handle the work-baby tug-of-war and how we feel about breast-feeding in public. I even bought my own maternity sweater (okay, that was kind of by accident). Babies, bellies and swollen breasts are a huge part of my life right now –- even if they all happen to belong to other people. But besides the fact that moms-to-be are main characters in my discussions with friends, in the articles I read, the web sites I peruse, and even the magazine I work for, no television program had pushed them into the spotlight.
Until now. First came this season's shows about love, then came marriage, and here comes "Notes from the Underbelly" with the baby carriage. The adventure of parenthood is the main theme of this half-hour sitcom about two pregnant couples and their two very single friends/sidekicks. The commercials made "Notes" look like "Sex and the City"-meets-"thirtysomething," and since I was a fan of both, I was curious to tune in last week.
At the start of the pilot, we learn that Andrew has been trying for months to convince his wife Lauren to have a baby. She was initially resistant to the idea, mainly because they hadn't done all the things they said they would do before starting a family, like--wait for it--"go on a whitewater rafting trip" (they both quickly admitted that neither ever had any intention of actually hitting the waves). Some other cliché baby "cons" are half-heartedly lobbed around (maternity underwear, "hideous minivan"), but then, while Lauren is out shopping for a peasant skirt, a little girl mistakes her for Mommy, prompting a major change-of-heart.
Cut to the couple freaking out over a positive pregnancy test. Well, Andrew (who looks barely old enough to rent a car, never mind father a child) is psyched, but Lauren is upset that this happened before she had time to lose weight and "file stuff."
The couple tries to keep the news from their friends for the standard three-month waiting period, but Andrew can't resist bragging about "shooting a hole in one," and Lauren inadvertently outs herself by ordering a decaf latte and refusing tequila shots (dead giveaways, right girls? Wink, wink!). So everyone knows about the baby within hours -- everyone, that is, except for Lauren's and Andrew's parents, whose conspicuous absence leads one to believe that they must be estranged, dead or not worth a long-distance phone call.
With a baby on the way, Lauren and Andrew have a lot to think about. So they grill other moms and dads and debate trading their Mini Cooper for a minivan. (I've got to interject here: I drove a minivan in high school, and it had a kickin' sound system and could fit ten comfortably. It was like a party on wheels!) But maybe because the couple is so overwhelmed and excited, and maybe because the show's producers didn't want to scare away potential viewers, they avoid the important stuff -- i.e., the kinds of things that any normal couple would discuss while pondering parenthood.
For example, Lauren works as a college counselor at a private school, which is a respectable job that surely required a college education and years of training and dedication. Yet the subject of what Lauren will do about work after having the baby never comes up. Maybe they'll deal with that in a future episode, but clearly Lauren's career has been superseded by her more pressing concerns about motherhood, like how to find time to go on vacation, renew her driver's license, decorate the nursery, diet, and organize her documents.
I'm already starting to hate these shallow, silly people when I'm introduced to their lame friends, stock characters like Julie the Sanctimommy-in-Training, Cooper the Bitter Divorce Lawyer (aka, female single friend), and Danny the Overgrown Frat-Boy (aka, male single friend). It doesn't help that the show is set in slick, sunny Los Angeles, a place where too many people make too much money by doing too little work. Everyone in the cast, including housewife Julie, can afford to shop on Robertson Boulevard, dress like B-list celebs, and drop loads of dough on expensive cars, shower gifts, multiple strollers and cribs. I'm really hoping that the jaw-dropping expense of raising a kid in America today will be addressed at some point. In the first double-episode, family finances, like Lauren's ambition, seemed to take a back car-seat to other ways that babies can affect a marriage, like sleepless nights and breasts "devastated" by breast-feeding.
These pregnancy "notes" must have come from someone who failed Parenthood 101, or perhaps from a sorority girl who skipped most of her classes in order to attend Pilates or get a manicure. So far, this show has done an embarrassingly bad job of addressing--or even alluding to--the complexities of having a baby and starting a family. At the same time, the dumb minivan snubs and tired jokes about Lauren's cravings (she scarfs tacos shells stuffed with pumpkin pie filling and nearly causes a ten-car pile-up in her manic quest for a burger) keep it from being subversive, fresh or even mildly interesting.
At the ELLE office, our giveaway table is always piled high with rejected mommy-lit. But at least I know that for every book like “Momzillas," there's a "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits" or a "Little Children" to read instead. If only there were other television shows that dealt with pregnancy and parenting in a smarter, more sophisticated way than "Notes from the Underbelly". For now, I think I'll pass up decaf lattes and lukewarm banter with Lauren and Co., and spend my Wednesday nights sharing straight talk about motherhood with my friends.