Word: alison
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...Take the Heigl character, Alison. In her mid-20s, she is smart, pretty and nice. She has a good job, that's getting better, at the E! Channel. And where does this independent achiever live? Why, in the home of her married sister Debbie (Leslie Mann), with Debbie's husband Pete (Paul Rudd) and their two kids. Apatow imagines that, in Los Angeles 2007, there's some time-warp housing-shortage like the one in World War II-era Washington, D.C. - the premise for the 1943 comedy The More the Merrier...
...celebrate a promotion at E!, Alison takes Debbie to a club; she meets Ben, they get drunk, have sex. etc. Eight weeks later, she suspects she's pregnant. Hmmm: at just the moment when she's been promoted to being an on-air reporter, she gets knocked up by a loser she barely knows and, when sober, can't stand. Some women would terminate the pregnancy. Alison doesn't, because ... because then there would be no movie - at least, not the kind Apatow wants to make. (Suggestion for an edgier romantic comedy. Two unsuited people get together, girl gets pregnant...
...Having chosen to bring the baby to term, Alison now has to figure out whether she brings Ben into the equation. In such a dilemma, whom can she confide in? You might expect that such a personable sort would have a circle of women friends - what Apatow would call her pussy posse - but not Alison. All right, no girlfriends. But she's got an infotainment job in L.A.; the place must be swarming with gay men, ready to offer their sympathy or tart wisdom. In show business, isn't there a Will for every Grace? No again; Alison is effectively...
...Alison's one sounding board is Debbie, who has issues of her own. In a word, she's a bitch. Ben's friends might diagnose Debbie's condition as a severe case of PMS, and they wouldn't be far off, if the P is for Perpetual. She hardly tries to conceal her hatred of men, and her husband in particular: "I get worse-looking and he gets better-looking. It's so unfair." Her theory of getting men to do a woman's bidding - "You criticize them a lot, and then they get so down on themselves that they...
...know. Debbie has to be a shrew, and her marriage with Pete a sad charade, to give Alison one more hurdle to jump: that she'll wonder if living with anyone, let alone Ben, is doomed to failure. But here's a little tip to budding screenwriters. If your refutation to questions of plot irregularity is "Because it's a movie!" - and especially if that card has to be played more than a few times (no friends, no abortion, supporting characters who are caricatures, a website subplot that collapses on closer inspection) - then maybe your script has plausibility problems...