There’s nothing quite like the unexpected twists that the birthing process can take to forever obliterate a woman’s idea that she can “plan” how her life as a mother is going to proceed. Despite the fact that many women are encouraged to create birthing plans in an attempt to instruct the medical team how they wish their labors to play out, childbirth is an unpredictable thing and frequently bears no resemblance to what’s written in a birth plan.
Up All Night‘s handling of Reagan Brinkley’s labor was a perfect send-up of this modern conceit as Reagan’s nearly 20-page plan was rendered useless in short order, much to her dismay.
Reagan vowed she wouldn’t have any pain meds, like many TV moms who’ve labored for the cameras have initially demanded. Yet, without judgment, Up All Night showed how quickly Reagan changed her mind as she weathered painful contractions and how happy she was after she received the epidural.
Reagan informed the handsome male ob/gyn (Joan’s husband from Mad Men) that there was no way she was going to allow him to be all up in her “business” and she requested a female obstetrician instead. (It’s one of the many cruel tricks played on pregnant women, the idea that she can go to great lengths to select the perfect ob/gyn and then wind up with a stranger who doesn’t care what she thinks delivering her baby.)
Of course, Reagan wound up not only having that male obstetrician deliver her baby, but having a C-section, something to which she vigorously objected. (She originally proclaimed that she would have a quick labor and be the best “pusher” the obstetrician had ever seen.) The writers did a fine job of comedically portraying the helplessness that a woman in labor feels when events are spiraling out of her control and things she expressly did not want to happen are indeed happening while her voice may as well be background noise coming from a white noise machine.
My favorite moment of the episode: When they were in the operating room for the C-section, Reagan asked Chris to play the music she’d specifically selected to be played during the birth. But Chris accidentally played his “workout mix” on his iPhone and their daughter Amy entered the world to the 1990s House of Pain tune “Jump Around.”
And we can’t omit Chris’ transformation. When the episode began, he was a lawyer who expected to take only a week off from work after the baby’s arrival for fear he’d be marginalized at work. However once Amy was there, for real, being cradled in Reagan’s arms, Chris changed his mind. Now he’s an at-home dad with plans to return to work that remain unclear at the moment. Not what he planned, but then again, when does parenthood go according to anyone’s plans?
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Oct 20, 2011 @ 12:05 EST5EDT
Best episode of the show so far.