ABC's Notes from the Underbelly: A Few Notes on Cliched Sitcom Writing

I was really looking forward to you, "Notes," after I had read about your trial run by ABC. You're set in LA which is sunshine therapy (even onscreen) to this East Coaster. Your lead characters are a landscape architect and a guidance counselor at an uppity private high school. Their friends are biracial. They talk about pashminas and reference the In n' Out burger. This show was going to be hip, I thought, and not try to reinvent parenthood a la Dave Barry. At least I had hoped.

I adored your lead female Jennifer Westfeldt in "Kissing Jessica Stein," particularly the way she says profound and sometimes cranky things without fully opening her mouth. That's cool. And the thought of her making the transition from "maybe bi" character to "clearly heterosexual, married, and pregnant" was exciting.

And I do like her character, Lauren, on "Notes from the Underbelly," especially because she's stylish and says all of those frazzled, hormonal things without opening her mouth (that's so cool), but I do not like her with your lead male, Peter Cambor (Andrew). He's a wimp. His hair is all right, but his expressions are often borderline Frankenstein which is strange and emotionally wimpy.

The pairing of these two characters is reminiscent of Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt on "Mad About You," but without the real true tension that amused us. Lauren and

Andrew build a tension which reminds me a lot of the kind of tiffs that took place in 7^th grade at the ice skating rink, because we know they're totally going to patch up the whole "You were dating other guys while we were dating?!?" feud over the discovery of that nostalgic votive candle Andrew stole for Lauren way back when. Awww. Dumb.

Another character knock-off is Lauren's friend Cooper (Rachael Harris), the trendy petite divorce lawyer who is a conniving, insensitive nymphomaniac. Samantha Jones, anyone? She is intended to be a foil to Lauren's more matronly, idealistic preg-head friend Julie (Melanie Paxson), who is the West-Coast, suburban Charlotte York.

The clichéd character portraits might be somewhat forgivable (even if "Sex and the City" is more than a faint memory in our minds) if your plot lines were a bit more novel. But they are not. They are basic and unoriginal, and oftentimes very predictable. See Lauren's belly grow. See Andrew make fun of it. See Julie go overboard at a baby shower. See Andrew freak out. The season finale did not even seem like a season finale. I had to go online just to make sure I wasn't missing something.

This base plotlining is comic suicide when it comes to building a fan-base for an 8:30 p.m. EST slot, which, although a good move considering your prospective audience which probably has a bedtime of 9 p.m., it can still really make it hard for folks like me to make "Notes" a priority. I'm still eating dinner sometimes at 8:30 p.m! Good thing for the DVR, though. But even the DVR does not have room for every half-hour of programming, particularly the kind that will not make me laugh but remind me of how clichéd the writing is when I am eating my dinner at 9:30 p.m.

I am sure that I will tune in occasionally to "Notes" to see what Lauren's belly gives way to (will it be a hipster boy who wears Vans or a Valley girl who wears Juicy Couture?) and to see whether the plotlines ratchet up the hilarity factor any more. But I will not watch this program as faithfully as I did this past season. Perhaps the writers will consult these notes on the underbelly of poor sitcom writing for future reference.