Stop me when it’s funny: amnio, sonogram, epidural, bloating, sleep deprivation, big underwear.
Laughing yet?
If obstetric humor isn’t your favorite, you won’t be prone to finding mirth in punchlines like those. Queasiness over the subject matter in ABC’s “Notes From the Underbelly,” debuting tonight at 9 on KMGH Channel 7, is only the first problem in this droll take on impending parenthood. Other challenges include the warmed-over material. Ever since the Mertzes and the Ricardos bumbled while trying to get Lucy to the hospital on time, television has delivered wacky maternity tales.
Now, with a postmodern attitude and yuppie sidekicks who are blatantly anti-motherhood, anti-family, TV mines the same rich territory – with more specific physiological allusions.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Lucy wasn’t allowed to use the word “pregnant” in her scripts; “Underbelly” finds limitless jokes about the cellphone videocamera footage as mom dilates. In both cases, there’s comedy to be breached from the helplessness of fathers, and the chaos caused by what once was a natural human event.
Thank goodness Rachael Harris is there, as Cooper the over-achieving professional, to inject acid retorts and tart cynicism into the proceedings.
Director-producer Barry Sonnenfeld, whose credits range from the action-comedy film “Men in Black” to the pilot for “The Tick” on television, has teamed with producers Kim and Eric Tannenbaum (“Two and a Half Men”) for a series that threatens to amount to a one-joke show: Pregnancy! It’s scary, painful, wonderful, miraculous, it changes everything.
At least the offspring is too young to have a speaking role.
