The premise of Up All Night, wherein a hip 30-something couple has their first child, Dad stays home, and Mom goes back to her job at a diva-run talk show, could easily lend itself to cliche: scenes of the dad watching football as the laundry piles up and the baby crawls around unsupervised (men are bad at housework, LOL), the mom spending all her time worrying if she’s failing her kid by working and failing at her job by being a mom. Instead, the show plays straight to the top of the audience’s intelligence.
Husband Chris (Will Arnett) is a perfectly competent homemaker and though wife Reagan’s (Christina Applegate) life is filled to the brim between her kid, her marriage, and her job, she enjoys (and is good at) all three areas. Reagan and Chris are also one of TV’s few examples of a married couple who generally like and respect each other.
First, are you watching Parenthood? If not, correct that immediately. Now that that’s out of the way, a few words in praise of Amber (Mae Whitman), a perfect corrective to every one-dimensional teen girl on television (we’re looking at you, casts of Gossip Girl and Secret Circle). Amber is smart but unfocused, incredibly close with her mom yet constantly pushing her away, good-hearted but medium-caustic. In short, she’s television’s most realistic depiction of a teenage girl since My So-Called Life (and her relationship with her mom is the best since Gilmore Girls, which could have something to do with the fact that Lauren Graham plays the mom on both shows).
The premise of Up All Night, wherein a hip 30-something couple has their first child, Dad stays home, and Mom goes back to her job at a diva-run talk show, could easily lend itself to cliche: scenes of the dad watching football as the laundry piles up and the baby crawls around unsupervised (men are bad at housework, LOL), the mom spending all her time worrying if she’s failing her kid by working and failing at her job by being a mom. Instead, the show plays straight to the top of the audience’s intelligence.
Husband Chris (Will Arnett) is a perfectly competent homemaker and though wife Reagan’s (Christina Applegate) life is filled to the brim between her kid, her marriage, and her job, she enjoys (and is good at) all three areas. Reagan and Chris are also one of TV’s few examples of a married couple who generally like and respect each other.
What list of great ladies on TV would be complete without Liz Lemon (Tina Fey)? Not this one! There’s a lot to like about Liz (endlessly quotable lines, the fact that she’s good at her job, her relatable fondness for mozzarella sticks), but perhaps the best part of Liz is that she’s an unapologetic weirdo. Whether she’s having a threesome with James Franco and a pillow, scheduling a root canal for Valentine’s Day, or realizing she can’t date a dumb man, Liz is always who she is and she doesn’t want to be anyone else.
Whip-smart, tough as nails, and laser-focused, Detective Jane Timoney (Maria Bello) isn’t just a list of items you could find at the hardware store, she’s a first-rate police officer battling skepticism and sexism from her colleagues within the force. Timoney isn’t hampered (or, flip side: helped) by a particular desire to be liked — in the parlance of reality TV, she’s not there to make friends, she’s there to be the best. This stone cold attitude is rare in a female protagonist we’re expected to like and, to be frank, it’s more than a little refreshing. Other than her ironclad determination to wear the dumbest hat on television, we have nothing bad to say about Jane Timoney.
Admittedly, Suburgatory has only aired one episode so far, but we feel pretty confident in predicting that Dallas (Cheryl Hines) is going to be the breakout character. Dallas’ Barbie-clone exterior and questionable parenting choices (Dallas, after daughter Dalia holds up a micro-mini: “It’s a little long, but I can hem it for you”) hide an interior that’s sweet enough to immediately take a maternal liking to sarcastic teen Tessa and a whole lot smarter than she gives away. Dallas gives the viewer a sense that she’s playing her cards close to her ample chest and we can’t wait to see how that develops.
