LOS ANGELES — Every year, the networks trot out some show or other that revolves around a baby, and every year, I start counting the hours before that baby vanishes.
Last year, it was baby Hope from “Raising Hope”; this year, it’s baby Amy from “Up All Night.” Five episodes into the latter, and creator Emily Spivey was already on flashbacks so we could experience the days leading to the birth. Pregnancy is, after all, much more interesting than new parenting because (and here’s me pointing out an elephant in the writers room) babies are very boring.
Not your baby, of course. Your own baby is a source of endless fascination.
But on television, until they are old enough to at least laugh on cue, they are simply adorable, demanding, perpetually damp little stand-ins for the much more interesting people they will eventually become.
It’s not their fault. Babies have only four settings — crying, sleeping, eating and wide-eyed silence — all of which are fun to watch for about 30 seconds. Which is why babies, like crazy kittens and sneezing pandas, are so popular on YouTube.
This is one reason infants are so rare in literary classics. Think about it. “Moby-Dick,” no babies, “Pride and Prejudice,” no babies, “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Jane Eyre” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Sun Also Rises,” pretty much the entire canon of William Shakespeare, no babies.
To make a baby interesting, you need to assign it adult characteristics, like in those hilarious E-Trade commercials or the “Look Who’s Talking” franchise. Mercifully, no one save Seth MacFarlane (creator and voice of Baby Stewie) is attempting this on a television series.
Instead, most writers concentrate on the life-changing nature of parenthood. They do this by having the adult characters engage in witty dialogue and soulful monologues.
So the first thing that gets axed in a show dealing with new parents is the kid. You certainly can’t have a likable character that sits around trading witty dialogue while their child actually needs something. Sometimes, the baby simply disappears with no explanation offered (“Breaking Bad”); sometimes, the marginal nature of the child becomes part of the joke (“Cougar Town”); and sometimes, the parents just shove their squalling newborn into a magical tree, allegedly to protect her from an evil spell (“Once Upon a Time”).
More typically, however, the child is simply relegated to the prop department, showing up only occasionally and in such a quiet, undemanding way that it is virtually unrecognizable as an actual child.
On “Modern Family,” for example, Mitchell’s (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron’s (Eric Stonestreet) daughter, Lily, went two seasons without making a sound or engaging in any activity that might rumple her white linen frock.
This season, the new, tiny actress playing older Lily is at least capable of speech and movement, but even so, her clothing and their house remain pristine. Which makes Mitchell’s and Cameron’s complaints about the pressures of parenthood a bit hard to take: Why on earth are they so exhausted when Lily apparently spends her day ironing and picking up her toys?
“Up All Night” stars Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as a couple of likable yunnies (young urban narcissists) who accidentally get pregnant and have to readjust their world views accordingly. The show hits all the predictable notes, but it’s basic message is universal: When you have a child, you are no longer the center of your own universe.
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