Critic’s Notebook: TV babies in semi-permanent timeout

Every year, the networks trot out some show or other that revolves around a baby, and every year, I start counting the hours before that baby vanishes. Last year, it was baby Hope from “Raising Hope”; this year, it’s baby Amy from “Up All Night.” Five episodes into the latter, and creator Emily Spivey was already on flashbacks so we could experience the days leading to the birth. Pregnancy is, after all, much more interesting than new parenting because (and here’s me pointing out an elephant in the writers room) babies are very boring.

Not your baby, of course. Your own baby is a source of endless fascination; well, enough to keep you from leaving him or her on the counter at Starbucks. Intentionally.

But on television, until they are old enough to at least laugh on cue, they are simply adorable, demanding, perpetually damp little stand-ins for the much more interesting people they will eventually become, more useful in theory than in practice; “new baby” as theme.

It’s not their fault. Babies have only four settings — crying, sleeping, eating and wide-eyed silence — all of which are fun to watch for about 30 seconds. Which is why babies, like crazy kittens and sneezing pandas, are so popular on YouTube and why you never see a sneezing panda as the centerpiece for a television show.

The entertainment value of the typical parental reaction to babies is equally short-lived. Sleepless zombies fumbling with overcomplicated baby gadgets are funny for about two minutes. After that, unless there are actual zombies involved, watching a new parent feels pretty much the same as being a new parent — repetitive and exhausting, without the key benefit of having an actual baby to cuddle, which is the only thing that makes real new parenting survivable.

This is one reason infants are so rare in literary classics. Think about it. “Moby-Dick,” no babies, “Pride and Prejudice,” no babies, “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Jane Eyre” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Sun Also Rises,” pretty much the entire canon of William Shakespeare, no babies. There is a baby in “The Grapes of Wrath,” but it dies almost immediately, which, along with illegitimacy and all that entails, is the major reason writers include infants. Oedipus was a baby who turned out to be interesting, as did Jesus and Tarzan. Pearl of “The Scarlet Letter” got pretty big billing (not to mention that terrific wardrobe). But the early years of even these notable exceptions did not include enough action to propel a television series.

To make a baby interesting, you need to assign it adult characteristics, like in those hilarious E-Trade commercials or the “Look Who’s Talking” franchise. Mercifully, no one save Seth MacFarlane (creator and voice of Baby Stewie) is attempting this on a television series.

Instead, most writers concentrate on the life-changing nature of parenthood. They do this by having the adult characters engage in witty dialogue and soulful monologues, of which no actual new parent is physically capable. New parents, and I say this as a former member of the ranks, are like stoners — they mumble a lot, and when you can decipher what they are saying, it is usually some long, drawn-out story about something “amazing” their child has done, which is completely impossible because no baby has ever done anything amazing. So the first thing that gets axed in a show dealing with new parents is the kid — you certainly can’t have a likable character that sits around trading witty dialogue while their child actually needs something. Sometimes, the baby simply disappears with no explanation offered (“Breaking Bad”); sometimes, the marginal nature of the child becomes part of the joke (“Cougar Town”); and sometimes, the parents just shove their squalling newborn into a magical tree, allegedly to protect her from an evil spell (“Once Upon a Time”) but more likely to skip all the boring years between infancy and when the kid becomes a butt-kicking Jennifer Morrison.

More typically, however, there is a lot of initial Sturm und Drang — oh, no, she cries; oh, no, he poops; and what is it with these crazy car seats anyway?? — and then the child is simply relegated to the prop department, showing up only occasionally and in such a quiet, undemanding way that it is virtually unrecognizable as an actual child.

On “Modern Family,” for example, Mitchell’s (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Cameron’s (Eric Stonestreet) daughter, Lily, went two seasons without making a sound or engaging in any activity that might rumple her white linen frock. This season, the new, tiny actress playing older Lily is at least capable of speech and movement, but even so, her clothing — and their house — remain pristine. Which makes Mitchell’s and Cameron’s complaints about the pressures of parenthood a bit hard to take: Why on earth are they so exhausted when Lily apparently spends her day ironing and picking up her toys?

When “Raising Hope” premiered on Fox last year, the baby in question (Hope) was given an untraditional task. Instead of wreaking havoc on the orderly lives of her parents, she arrived in the middle of the wildly eccentric and mildly trashy Chance family to institute order. By the end of the pilot, new grandma Virginia (Martha Plimpton) had even quit smoking! But once all the how-do-you-work-this-diaper and how-gross-is-spit-up nonsense abated, Hope became much more a theme than a character. Another miraculously silent and needs-free child, she now spends her tiny wedges of screen time watching the real stars work their way through plot points that rarely have anything to do with her — a recent episode dealing with Hope’s hitting issues, for example, quickly turned out, hilariously, to be about the anger issues of every other character.

And what else should she and the writers be doing? She’s a baby! We certainly don’t want her behaving like an actual child — interrupting the dialogue 756 times or falling off the bed or getting an ear infection or needing to be changed six times in five minutes. And how many jokes can the human race wring from sleepless nights and spit-up stains?

That’s what “Up All Night” promises to discover. The most straightforward response to parental complaints that TV was ignoring them, “Up All Night” stars Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as Reagan and Chris, a couple of likable Yunnies (young urban narcissists) who accidentally get pregnant and have to readjust their world views accordingly. As if lifted from “What to Expect When You’re Expecting: A TV Show About Parenting,” the show hits all the predictable notes, albeit in an entertaining enough way. Creator Spivey wisely made Regan a producer of an “Oprah”-esque talk show, allowing Maya Rudolph, as Ava, the show’s star and Reagan’s needy best friend, to embody the satiric contrast of an adult child versus an actual child. It’s a smart twist, and it has gone far in allowing the show to thus far neatly skirt its intrinsic contradiction.

Which is that the message — when you have a child, you are no longer the center of your own universe — is at utter odds with the medium. At least until the kids get old enough to climb out of that magical tree and save the world or at least deliver a good sassy comeback.

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com