When Will A Baby Tarnish Trophy Wife?

Having already gone on the record as being 100% in the tank for Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern's Trophy Wife, I've watched the still-young season with growing interest (and growing concern). But last night's episode, which revolved around Jackie's (Michaela Watkins) feelings of jealousy that her son Bert (Albert Tsai) might like his stepmother Kate (Malin Akerman) better than his own mother just because Kate knows who Iron Man is (and…that there is no such thing as Ironing Man), gave me a chilling premonition of how everything could go horribly wrong: what if Kate gets pregnant?

Trophy Wife has spent its first few episodes educating its audience about Pete Harrison (Bradley Whitford), his three wives -- two past, one present -- and the power struggles they get into with each other, mostly but not only revolving around the three children Pete accumulated in his first two marriages. Marcia Gay Harden is perfect as Diane, Wife #1, an orthopedic surgeon/icy disciplinarian with extremely rigid ideas about the right way to do…everything; I assume it goes without saying that she's my favourite character. Watkins is also great as Jackie, Pete's second wife, an aimless hippie type who may be a little too focused on Bert, though last week's episode hinted that she might be thinking about getting into online dating, which could be a very rich vein of comedy in future episodes. Tsai and Ryan Lee (the latter of whom plays Diane and Pete's son Warren) are the rarest of commodities: kid actors who are loaded with comic timing and free of cloying precocity. As Hillary, Pete and Diane's daughter, Bailee Madison is basically fine, but she hasn't been given that much to do yet; the latest episode shows us her academic cockiness for the first time, so if she turns into a Monica Geller-esque keener like her mom, that could be fun.

If you've seen the show and done the math, you know this leaves Akerman's Kate. And so far, she's not doing so hot. So far, because what she wants most is to win over her stepchildren, Kate's primary purpose has been to model bad parenting: she lets Bert stay up late, gives Hillary the idea of sneaking vodka into a concert in a water bottle (then chugs it to hide Hillary's crime from Diane), and doesn't counter Bert's request to trick-or-treat with her by suggesting that Jackie could come, too.

In more recent episodes, there's also been a more troubling theme of putting empty spaces in Kate's cultural literacy that are probably supposed to remind us of how much younger she is than Pete's first two wives (which, by the way: Akerman's only six years younger than Watkins), but which only make her seem dumb. Even if Kate is supposed to be in her late twenties, she should be able to tell, in last week's episode, that Diane was dressed as Pat Benatar for an '80s fundraiser once she gets a "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" context clue. And as for the latest episode: I don't care how young Kate is, she should know a Queen Elizabeth I costume when she sees it. Kate has had a friend, Meg (Natalie Morales), pop up intermittently over the season's first six episodes to give us tantalizing reminders of the life Kate had before she joined the blended family that makes up most of the action, and it already feels like producers might be trying to figure out a way to edit Meg out as Kate works harder at being a wife and stepmother.

One of the many things we don't know about Kate is whether she wants to have biological children, or whether she's content to co-parent the kids Pete had in his previous marriages. But if she were to become pregnant, it would finally give producers a framework to drape her character on. Did she get pregnant accidentally or on purpose? Will the hardships of pregnancy give her a new appreciation for Diane? What kind of weird and/or objectionable gimmicky pregnancy trends will she latch on to?

The problem with Kate getting pregnant, other than everything, is that there's so much we don't know about Kate. Does she have a job now? Did she have a job before she got married? Does she have interests? Does she have siblings? Does she have friends other than Meg? Do her parents have any thoughts on her having married someone a generation older than herself? Does she have parents? What I hope for the show is that Kate, as its titular lead, will eventually get the chance to turn into a well-rounded character who's interesting to watch. And if she gets pregnant, she'll change from being Kate -- as much of a Kate as we've gotten to know thus far, which isn't much -- to Pregnant Woman and then Mom. And then what will make her any different from Jackie or Diane? Where's the tension? What's the point?

That babies ruin sitcoms is a truth universally acknowledged -- and yet, for a show with a premise like this, it will be weirder if it just never comes up. Sarah Haskins, the real-life Trophy Wife, did have a baby, but let's hope she's less interested in giving us a one-to-one fictionalized version of her experience than an entertaining show, and will let Kate and Pete raise the question of becoming parents and then drop it, forever. The alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.