Up All Night - Episode 1.03 - Working Late and Working It - Review

"Are you kid— look at that! Look at the lift you get; it's like 40% more butt." —Chris

Up All Night is now set on making Ava a talk show caricature and slowly turn all the other characters into the same cartoonish alter egos, in a sense. And we're all just going to have to either deal with it and come to terms with the fact that the humanized, actual people we were watching in the pilot are gone or else just tune out. And if you decided to stay, Up All Night's latest episode probably didn't do much to convince you to stick around next week.

It was an episode with a plot so glaringly obvious as to how it would end that the show had to continuously win you over with witty dialogue or some other such flashiness but instead it failed to utilize that opportunity correctly. We start out with Chris underwhelmed with the way Reagan dresses at home, but it took until halfway through the episode for the plot to pay off (even with Will Forte, who did nothing but speak softly and share incredulous wisdom, a character that seems all too familiar for him but I welcome).

When Reagan comes into the kitchen, as Chris is serving her breakfast, wearing her "fancy" clothing and speaking "fancily," I completely lost it. The acting — and even the writing — was so on point that I forgave the show for misinterpreting their own character, Chris, wanting more sexy… not fancy. That entire scene was nothing but for huge laughs and it definitely pulled it off. All the way 'til, "I think the staff is stealing our silver." It was honestly one of the funniest things I had seen on TV all last week, or since the season began.

But that's about the only thing that was funny on that end.

And on the other side we have Ava acting out that her ex is now getting married. He used to be some trashy celeb, so obviously when they meet up again he will appear like he got his act together but really be the same old guy. We knew that would happen. Thankfully, this plot paid off more (though, not in the same gut-busting laugh like the Fancy Scene) than the Chris storyline. Especially since the payoffs were much more often.

That's including, but not limited to, the fantastic parody of terrible 1990s music videos with "Basically" (so much so, I just had to embed the entire thing below). Or when Ava and B-Ro are up to their old antics yelling at each other outside of a restaurant with Reagan trying to stop it.

Unfortunately, Chris and Reagan's dressing up storyline truly only worked in a non-funny way at the end of the episode, but that's probably because Christina Applegate and Will Arnett have a sort of easy chemistry with one another. Overall not the best episode in terms of hilarity and it couldn't have come at a worse time, when viewers have seemingly been jumping off the bandwagon. I can only hope it charmed them in other ways. I'm certainly not out.

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My Up All Night reviews:
Episode 1.01 Pilot
Episode 1.02 "Cool Neighbors"