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PregnantsomethingsThe new ABC sitcom Notes From the Underbelly.

By Troy PattersonPosted Wednesday, April 11, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET

Peter Cambor and Jennifer Westfeldt of Notes From the UnderbellyDo you have a child? Are you a child? Have you been struck by any recent developments on the child-rearing front? Have you ever tried writing, say, an article about a television show in a coffee shop in Brooklyn? Mommies engage in competitive dandling. Poppa wears his Snugli like Run-DMC wore gold rope chains. Young Otto and little Ursula make frequent, occasionally successful, breaks for the door. A is for Alternadad. B is for Babble.com. C is for Cookie magazine.

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Into this moment of maternity cults, daddy memoirs, and the narcissism of what Time's James Poniewozik, for one, terms "parenting-as-performance," now toddles Notes From the Underbelly (ABC, debuts Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET). It is a sitcom, occasionally sharp as an epidural needle, often dumb as a pea pod, sometimes half decent. (Variety, exercising sound judgment and questionable taste, has already quipped that the series is unlikely to make it beyond its first trimester.) Notes pits housewives against career gals and constrained fathers against liberated bachelors. It's about the loss of identity, the accrual of responsibilities, the social rivalries among friends, and—what's that in the Maclaren?—ah, yes, the baby. Coochie-coochie-coo.

The leads are Jennifer Westfeldt, best known as the star of Kissing Jessica Stein, and Peter Cambor, a newcomer soon to be known as the guy you call when you can't get Paul Rudd. Westfeldt plays Lauren, a blonde who, despite being in her early 30s, remains girlish in that fuzzy chick-lit way, with the shoe collection and the foregrounded indecisiveness. Cambor is Andrew, her husband, a cutie also in his early 30s, a planner but a bumbler, neurotic yet dudelike enough to plausibly anchor a beer commercial. They're pregnant!

Lauren's a guidance counselor at a Los Angeles private school serving the special needs of entitled twerps, and Andrew's a landscape architect, but let's cut to what really matters here: what they buy. The Mini Cooper, the yoga classes, the weekend getaway to a boutique hotel, the (dated) talk of pashmina and peasant skirts … It would be easier to sympathize with Andrew's second-episode fretting about the cost of raising a kid if he weren't airing his concerns in a kitchen bigger than Clair Huxtable's, or, indeed, Babbo's.

"Oh. My. Gosh. What if Marc Jacobs started making baby clothes?!" That's Lauren's friend Julie (Melanie Paxson), another mommy-to-be, a figure of derision on account of her unhealthy excitement and obnoxious good cheer. An alien being has taken hold of her from inside, and now she's a pod person. Julie's opposite number is Cooper (Rachael Harris), an unmarried divorce attorney. The character is very familiar—disposing of lovers with the gusto of Sex and the City's Samantha, downing drinks and spitting insults with the speed of Will & Grace's Karen Walker, and putting in the long hours of a standard workaholic—but Harris plays Cooper with a frosty slickness that makes her the most memorable part of this affair.

Here's a question to ask when, next week, Julie's baby arrives: Is it supposed to be satirical or cute that she names it after the Sephora-like perfume emporium where her water broke? A laugh about babies-as-lifestyle-accessories, or what? Notes From the Underbelly wants it both ways, to have an extravagant shower and mock it too. ABC—"No. 1 among upscale viewers"—continues to have the weirdest relationship with class, consumption, and status anxiety of any of the networks. New dramas like Brothers & Sisters and Men in Trees constitute what this column has called, and intends to keep calling, soap operas where the soap's a mandarin-lavender body wash. They look like shelter magazines and play like genteel psychodramas. Meanwhile, Ugly Betty valorizes a sweet, upwardly mobile girl from King of Queens territory, teases elites, and gets a W cover for the effort. And then a sitcom like this comes around—Big Day, about weddings, was another—trying to twit upscale pretensions even as it fondles them, which really doesn't leave a free hand with which to make a joke.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The latest trend in developing shows with mass market appeal is exactly what is described here: a vaguely written show with a broad range of characters involved in story lines and delivering dialogue that never quite lets you in on the "intention" of the writer/creators.

News Flash: This is the intention.

Rather than trying to be all things to all people, these types of shows are nothing. It's a 1/2 hour Rohrschach test.

Those expectant parents who bear uncanny resemblances to the main characters will find it to be a cute, fun show about the most exciting yet frightening time in a couples life! [insert visual of giddy yuppies holding hands and eskimo kissing here] Cynics will see it as a satire that probably lacks teeth. And people with no real thoughts on the child bearing process will see it as another in a seemingly endless stream of indistinguishable sitcoms. Statistically, at least some of them will watch.

This kind of projection based television has become increasingly common in recent years with one of the biggest practitioners/offenders being Entourage (is it the satire critics claim or a vicarious thrill for fratboys?), but even relatively straightforward looking dramadies sport the same viewer-defined aesthetic. Is Grey's Anatomy a soap opera or a comedy? Of the handful of GA fans I have encountered, it seems to be a 50/50 split what the intention of the show is.

Really, with ironic detatchment having such a prominent role in the modern media experience; it seems that sometimes the best thing a TV show can do to cover its bases is avoid staking any position too carefully. That way when the viewer sees what they want to see, you can tell them: Exactly!

--EMStoveken

(To reply, click here.)

It's funny how, to move all those beauty supplies, most of our marketing culture targets consumers to live forever in some mythical age of 18 or so—gotta' convince the teens to look older, convince the twenty-somethings they're too fat and wrinkled, and all that takes chemical engineering as much as advertising.

The actual ideal is so fleeting that we pass through that year or two hardly realizing it, even those of us who are pretty enough. Certainly I wasn't paying much attention to all the fevered pitches when I was nineteen--I was more busy trying to find out how compatible sex and cheap beer were (answer: less than they'd have you believe). I was being pressured to relive the glory days, pretty much the second I stopped living them. What could I consume to pretend I was still living them?

Even shorter than the traipse though the adult/teen threshold are those ten or twelve new baby months. Don't get me wrong, the passage takes about as long, but the magic rubs off a hell of a lot quicker. Without marketing the Disney magic of pregnancy wears off pretty well completely by the time Junior finally starts sleeping through the night.

But there's a whole pregnancy industry—a whole parallel bizarro dimension—that exists between the time you find out the blessed news and the time you decide you're sick of midnight feedings. There are pregnancy magazines, pregnancy books, pregnancy party supplies, and baby registries full of endless pregnancy products. The magazines amaze me. Covers of celebrities shooting across the sky in their moment of pregnancy fame. It's selling pregnancy as a lifestyle, and no one lives it for very long except for the editorial board. Maybe if they push it hard enough, women would want to get pregnant again, relive the magic. Can Underbelly last as a sitcom? They'll have to either get an audience of well-conditioned pregnancy groupies, or else replenish the demographic every couple of months. I'd call it insane, but it seems to work.

--Keifus

(To reply, click here.)

(4/15)

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