ABC's Better With You ended its freshman run with "Better With the Baby." By the title, it's easy to predict the main event in the episode: Maddie (Jennifer Finnigan) searches for her next career path. Oh, and Mia (Joanna Garcia-Swisher) also goes into labor. Everyone rushes to the hospital to be there for her birth, which is complicated when she suddenly decides she must be married before the baby comes. Casey (Jake Lacy), a.k.a. the most patient boyfriend in the world, agrees. The cast must pull together to make that happen, because unlike many first-time mothers, it is soon clear that Mia's baby is coming pretty quickly.
It's May sweeps, which is the biggest sweeps period for stunts because it overlaps with season finales. Better With You merges a wedding and a birth into one plot, serving the necessary big developments quota. By combining those two particular events, the sitcom could easily shoot itself in the foot, making the episode utterly unbelievable and ridiculous. For a freshman series to do so is unwise. Yet, the series pulls it off with a pretty charming episode.
That's because 'baby' and 'wedding' are not pounded in the viewer's faces every minute. Better With You's strength is the tightly defined six main characters and their interactions and dialogue with each other. By structuring "Better With the Baby" as a series of those small scenes that happen to surround the hype story, the show strikes a delicate balance in entertainment, pulling off a not-terrible episode from a risky recipe.
It probably also helps that one character is really not thinking much about the baby at all. Maddie steals a list of patients and their occupations from the nurses' station, and spends much of her time running around to discuss different career possibilities for herself. All of the Better With You characters are selfish, in the tradition of Seinfeld and It's Always Sunny..., but this may be a new low. Her sister is giving birth down the hall! In Maddie's defense, she does keep tabs on Mia, and does not miss anything important. But still...
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