Three things are preventing me from providing thoughtful analysis of ABC’s new series “In the Motherhood,” so I’m going to get them out of the way so I can think more clearly.
• The visually assaulting gorgeousness of it all – homes, workplaces, wardrobes. YES, I KNOW IT’S TV, so please, for the love of God, don’t comment, pointing out how stupid I am that I haven’t realized that there are lots of people employed to make things look as pretty as possible on TV. I know that no one wants to see solidly middle-class homes with scuffed walls and shabby furniture populated by muffin-topped moms in ponytails, but you lose a giant chunk of credibility when it’s so over-the-top designer.
• Aren’t Cheryl Hines and Megan Mullally pushing 50? Hines’ character, Jane, has an infant. Is this “In the Grannyhood”? I haven’t been over to see what the women on UrbanBaby are saying, but they must be spitting nails. They hate grannymoms. Wait. That might be a positive for the show. Anything that puts a bee in the bonnet of those biatches is a good thing.
• There was no introduction, no backstory. Who’s got a husband, how many kids does that one have, who works, who’s hilariously adjusting to being a soccer mom? It’s certainly edgy to just jump right in, but once you’ve pissed off your audience, you’re not likely to see them back next week.
• Jane calls her sitter her manny. As in, “I have to go relieve the manny.” Only on TV. (Remind me to tell you about the time my father told passers-by who cooed over Tink at Sundance that he was Lucy Liu’s nanny.)
• Could the title be any clunkier? I think I know what they were getting at, so why didn’t they just call it something like “In the Trenches,” or “The Mommy Trenches”?
All right, so that’s five.
There’s Jane, the career mom who hasn’t had sex in a while and is worried about her upcoming third date; the perfect mom (Jessica St. Clair); and Mullally’s character is the dark one. In the first episode, she fakes being pregnant to get free stuff. Since the writers didn’t make clear what everyone’s names are, they missed the chance to get a laugh over what would have been in her uterus had she actually been with child – Rosemary’s baby.
With so much effort put into the ironic, postmodern tone, the writers forgot to write good stories. Shuffle up the characters and trot out the same old sitcom tricks.
I was a little confused about this Web series turned network program until I poked around a bit. There had been a call out to submit your parenting adventures, like the online episodes featured, but the writers guild objected, so it’s a regular scripted show, and the real-mom stories can be found on ITM’s Web site. There’s no paradigm for a show conceived by a marketing company, so who knows what will be bigger – the actresses on TV Thursday nights or the online “community.”
The best part of the show was the split-screen Suave commercial (a major sponsor), which said everything this episode of “In the Motherhood” wanted to say but in 30 seconds.
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abdpbt 03.27.09 at 6:00 pm
Yeah, I felt like they were trying to take a mommyblog and put it on TV. They lost me.
abdpbt’s last blog post..Not So Cute: Kelly From The Real Housewives of New York City