Up All Night - 1x12 - New Years Eve

So yeah, it's not really a secret I'm behind. It gets a little harder to hide when the episode in question is "New Years Eve" and we've just rung in April. Ninety-nine percent of the problem is pure laziness, admittedly. But the remaining one percent is that it's hard to figure out what to write about shows I actually like. Shows with very few problems have no hooks, no obvious places to start going off on a rant. It's hard to get excited about writing.

Anyway, New Years Eve is a perfectly cute episode. It's full of exactly what we love about these characters, while all the stuff we hate is rightfully called out. We get some more Kevin and Ava, which I'm always a big fan of. And we even learn more about Missy! We learn she's batshit insane, but is that really a surprise? I love that girl.

Firstly, we get a disappointing new years montage, charting Chris and Reagan's relationship. In addition to being severely curtailed (only three out of the ten years), we get to see how they met, but do not see Chris going "You have blurn hair, I love blurn hair." Boo.

Apparently Chris has always had a thing for blurns.

In the present, they can't get a baby sitter to watch Amy while they par-tay, so New Years Eve turns into low key couples date night.

If this isn't Maya Rudolph's Facebook picture, the entire
Internet has been a failure.

Invited, of course, are Ava and Kevin. Their deal this episode is that Kevin is starting to feel like Ava's ashamed of him because she's not including him in her "glamorous" lifestyle (I cannot stress those quotes enough). It turns out that Kevin's not paranoid and the reason she actually is keeping him away from the limelight. Ava eventually explains it's because she doesn't want to immortalize him in internet fame. See, if she messes things up with him, she'll always be reminded of it when she googles herself. And she googles herself a lot.

Also invited is missy and her guy, Issac. She met him on J-Date, and he's "half a J", but she's a "Roman C" and ...is it me, or did that whole "J" bit steer uncomfortably close to ethnic slurring? I'll go down to Williamsburg and start calling out some "HJ's" and let you know. Anyway, this guy is like movie star handsome. And British. And a doctor. And a chef. Reagan says that he literally makes David Beckham look "like an actual pile of garbage".

Wait, which part of David Beckham are we talking about?

Missy finds him super annoying for some unknown reason (then again, being with a perfect person can probably do that). I mean, she really, really hates him. There is seething. Maybe it has something to do with the way she keeps gushing over Ava, but man.  She actually ditches him at the party, but comes back at the last minute and they make up.

To be fair, I did do that same dance after winning TV-SceneIt

Meanwhile, Reagan is insanely supercompetitive on game nights, because of course, what sitcom wife isn't? Tired trope is tired, but moderately useful for three reasons: the gag where Chris has apparently hidden all the games in random boxes ("I wonder where the old light bulbs went..."), the actual presentation of her insanity (handled awesome as always by them both), and that it leads to them writing down everything that annoys them about the other on a giant board so that they can promise to stop as a new years resolution. Where do these sitcom couples keep their giant markerboards?

Even Ava and Kevin, who just came back from their doozy of a fight see that's a horrible, horrible idea. Luckily, both of them voluntarily relent in a very cute scene, frantically erasing annoyances from the board before the clock strikes midnight, leaving only one thing for each. I think we'll all be happier when every Borat impression is struck from the world.

I'll always love you, honey. But you bust out 'I Like!' one more time,
and I will divorce you and see to it you never see Amy again.