TV Review: 'Up All Night' -- 3 stars

Up All Night

3 stars

Christina Applegate and Will Arnett give up their wild Hollywood eating/drinking/dancing/smoking lifestyle to have a baby.

Then she goes back to work producing an “Oprah”-style TV show while he plays “baby daddy,” which, by his definition, means staying home to raise the kid.

How hard could it be? She’s torn between family time and executing show themes such as “eats for the diabeets.” He gets spooked by baby-loving old ladies in scary-huge supermarkets — when he isn’t playing video games with some surfer-daddy dude from the park.

In other words: They’re overwhelmed.

But, thank goodness, their show isn’t. NBC’s original pilot — provided to critics in the spring — was a music-pumped, digression-crammed mess, committing the cardinal sin of bearing little resemblance to real life.

The do-over premiering Tuesday night has chilled out considerably, putting the focus on what truly matters — family — to anybody who is now or ever has been in our stars’ situation. The single-camera tone is less showoff-y, more forgiving and appreciably sweeter, while still retaining a hip wistfulness for those crazy days before 24/7 baby maintenance and nurturing.

“Up All Night” has grown up, stepping outside its self-absorbed Hollywood head and into the heartland, where even outre characters such as the TV diva played by Maya Rudolph (“Saturday Night Live”) can be made more likable despite egotistically talking in funny accents. She, Arnett and especially the sublime Applegate now sell it well by not appearing to at all.