The answer is totally crazy Hollywood idiots had super-bad ideas. You want to read this. I’m sort of an old dude, but I liked the first season of Up All Night. Christina Applegate and Will Arnett played parents that I could relate to, and there were plenty of good jokes. The show was a solid B performer. And then things started getting weird.
After the first season, NBC decided to make some changes – a lot of changes. Gone was Applegate’s career at Ava, an Oprah-parody TV show. Now she was the stay-at-home parent, while Arnett’s character started a contracting business. And then they decided to turn the show from a single-camera sitcom (think The Office) to a multi-camera jobbie (think Two And A Half Men). And then the show’s creator, Emily Spivey, quit. And then Christina Applegate quit.
From the outside, you could tell that something was very wrong. Thankfully, we have TV Guide to tell us what. They just published a pretty epic rundown of the show’s tragic story, and this is the money shot: what new showrunner Linda Wallem and her writing staff were thinking of doing to reboot the show. Read it and weep.
One pitch placed a portal between the two worlds — the single-cam and multi-cam versions — that only baby Amy could see. Another idea put Wallem and her real-life partner, Melissa Etheridge, in front of the camera, perhaps with the action taking place in their living room.
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. 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.
Portals between worlds? Shows-within-shows? Melissa Etheridge? What the f was going on in that production company that any of these sounded like good ideas?