You would think that the craziest thing about NBC’s beleaugered comedy Up All Night — the show that launched a million mommy blog recaps — was that it hasn’t been canceled, even though star Christina Applegate quit the show, other star Will Arnett is attached to another pilot, and third star (does that make this a constellation?) Maya Rudolph is pregnant with her 3700th (OK, 4th) child. No, the craziest thing was how they were going to relaunch the show for the millionth time.
TV Guide has an excellent article that details the many changes and challenges that show has faced since Emily Spivey created it last season. She has also left the show. NBC was going to change it from a hip single-camera comedy to a more traditional Everybody Loves Two and a Half Bang Theories three-camera comedy. But just how was it going to do that? Its ideas are astoundingly bad.
RELATED: What Happened to the ‘Up All Night’ We Loved?
One idea was to have writer Linda Wallem and her partner, rocker Melissa Etheridge, somehow get involved with the show. Another had something to do with a portal between two worlds that only Amy, the baby of Applegate and Arnett’s characters, could see. The portal would explain how they went from a single-camera world to a multi-camera world — think Dorothy landing in Oz, minus the tornado. But the final version, the one that NBC was actually going to put on the air, sounds so crazy and bad it will make you fall out of your chair and through that portal into the world that baby Amy rules over.
“Ultimately, a script was written in which Applegate, Arnett and Rudolph played actors portraying the characters Reagan, Chris and Ava on a fictional show called Up All Night,” TV Guide reports. “Off the show-within-a-show, Arnett’s character would live at home with his mother, and Applegate’s would be dating. Rudolph’s real-life pregnancy was being written into the storyline — and included a ‘who’s the daddy?’ twist.”
I’m actually a little bit sad that this thing seems next to canceled, because I would have taken such joy in watching that relaunch. It would have gone down in the annals of American TV history, but not in a good way. Well, maybe it would in a good way, in baby Amy’s world.
Follow Brian Moylan on Twitter @BrianJMoylan
[Photo Credit: Colleen Hayes/NBC]
From Our Partners:
Seal Is Dating the Pink Power Ranger: Report (Vh1)
60 Celebrity Bikini Bodies: Guess Who! (Celebuzz)
