100 Favorite Shows: #24 — 30 Rock
“We’re on a show within a show! My real name is Tracy Morgan!”
In the fall of 2006, NBC gave full season orders to two new shows about the behind-the-scenes goings on of a live sketch comedy series: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and 30 Rock. One was a surefire hit from Aaron Sorkin and the other was the fledgling, eccentric baby of former Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey. In a twist of fate, Sorkin’s show was canned after one season and 30 Rock tore off three consecutive Outstanding Comedy Series trophies at the Emmys. Running seven full seasons on the Peacock network, 30 Rock was an all-timer for showbiz satire.
(Spoilers for 30 Rock are located in every paragraph of this essay, which is about 30 Rock. There’s also spoilers for M*A*S*H, but you’d have to really want them.)
There is a moment in the fourteenth episode of 30 Rock’s third season when Liz Lemon (Fey) is forced to reason with Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) for the umpteenth time in her career that floored me how something so dumb could be so brilliant. Liz is in the middle of her worst day ever: her Princess Leia get-out-of-jury-duty-free card failed, Jenna’s (Jane Krakowski) on sleeping pills, and Tracy yearns to say anything he wants on television. When these actions begin to harm the “Girlie Show” crew, Liz fruitlessly tries to reason with Tracy. Instead, he proclaims his loyalty to the crew by saying, “We all talk trash about our boss, Liz Lem-” Tracy realizes, of course, that he’s actually speaking to Liz Lemon and his way out of the discomfort is to do… absolutely nothing. He stares at her, unblinking and mouth agape. The camera cuts to a disgruntled Liz and then quickly cuts back to Tracy, in the exact same position.
It’s not the funniest moment in 30 Rock. Hell, it’s probably not even in my top one hundred. But something about it just walloped me when I witnessed it on my most recent rewatch. Obviously, the quicker a cut is, the funnier the joke tends to be. But the blind commitment to the idea that he’s managed to avoid insulting Liz is just hysterical to me. 30 Rock often managed to get more laughs out of me with a single look like that than most shows managed to do with carefully constructed and pored-over jokes.
30 Rock’s sense of humor operates in the realm of being one of the biggest laugh factories (read: pig slaughtering house) television has ever produced. You’d miss three jokes just trying to figure one out and by then, it was too late to laugh — even if it was the funniest thing you’d heard all day. An analysis of the episode scripts seems like someone wrote the most cliche screenplay possible and then punch-up writers went in and put a joke into every single line of dialogue. It was remarkable. Not only did ten jokes come with every minute of an episode, but these jokes had such a wide range of humor, as well.
There were visual gags (Jack Donaghy’s (Alec Baldwin) “There, there” business card), recurring jokes (Frank’s (Judah Friedlander) ever-changing hat, the best of which read, “Half Centaur”), quick cut-away gags (Edwiga (Rachel Dratch) quoting Happy Days from the elevator), meta humor (Kenneth’s (Jack McBrayer) nose pressing up against the glass of the camera in “Standards and Practices,” as noticed by my dad), gibberish words (Blrugh! Fraijer! The Scrabble tiles spelling “Hitler!”, and absurdist jokes that made no sense in or out of the show’s context, but were funny anyway (I still have no idea what Haldeman mailboxes are).
This meta sense of self-awareness on 30 Rock went far beyond just “the next level” (Jenna looking at the camera and admitting she’s never met Mickey Rourke to Liz’s questioning of object permanence, for example), though. Often times, 30 Rock would get so far involved in its own satire that it would evolve into a satire of 30 Rock itself.
For example, there weren’t just episodes of 30 Rock where they would recreate previous episodes’ scenes and lines of dialogue to make fun of shows that spun their wheels in later seasons. But by having Al Gore appear twice to remark, “A whale is in trouble,” 30 Rock showed that they had already possessed meta commentary on this very subject. And when they decided to record two episodes of the series live? Forget about it. All story was off by that point and it became a joke delivery system straight to the gut. By having Tracy become obsessed with “breaking” in the first live arc, “Live Show,” Robert Carlock and Fey showed they were already prepared to make fun of themselves for attempting live comedy in the first place.
The meta lens also existed in conversation with Fey’s own education on solid joke writing. In a way, 30 Rock was often indirectly informative about how live television production operated at NBC Studios (the team behind the show was so ingrained in SNL culture that it was hard not to be educational), but they were also informative about the science of jokes themselves. Take Tracy in the episode, “Greenzo,” for example. (This is the one where David Schwimmer turns up to play Greenzo, an environmental crusader who takes on the man. The man, in this instance, is Jack Donaghy, who refers to Greenzo as “Redzo.”) Regarding foxy boxing, he says it comes with his two favorite things: “boxing and referees.” This is a fairly simple, but fun joke of subversion, but it’s the kind of thing Fey peppered in all the time. Even more devoutly, she held the “rule of three” in jokes on a pedestal. I’m pretty sure it was commented on at least five times by different characters.
There was also one of the largest sums of callback jokes ever constructed. Everything from cheating at Monopoly to pirate-induced Stockholm syndrome to paninis to a volleyball team called the “Sluts” to Lance Drake Mandrell (Billy Baldwin) managed to weave its way into multiple arcs inside of the GE Building.
30 Rock even pulled off a flurry Hollywood in-jokes that resonated only with the most (pop) culturally literate of 30 Rock viewers. In-depth, inaccessible jokes about M*A*S*H (“What’s all this crying about babies and chickens?” Alan Alda’s Milton Greene asks in “Kidney Now!” “I thought this was supposed to be a comedy show”) or Bewitched (Carrie Fisher’s Rosemary Howard remarks, “The closest I got [to being Samatha Stevens] was being married to a gay man for two years”) made me feel like there were probably about a thousand others I wasn’t smart enough to get.
With breathtaking dexterity, 30 Rock could reference the Miami Heat, the Noid, and Giles Corey in one line and they would all feel completely natural within the context of the show. That’s because the show had no context. Whatever the writers (a brilliant team over the years which consisted of comedic legends like Donald Glover, Tracey Wigfield, Hannibal Buress, Kay Cannon, and, of course, Fey herself) felt like including, they included it. And it helped turn what started out as a showbiz satire based on Fey’s experiences at SNL (TBD on if SNL exists in the TGS universe) into a live action cartoon.
Seriously, this was way more than an exaggerated depiction of all swaths of American society (from Jack’s New England upbringing to Liz’s midwest sensibilities to Tracy’s city life to Kenneth’s backwoods fucked-uppery). It was literally like Looney Tunes had been adapted into live action and set at NBC’s New York studios.
For example, at one point in the second season episode, “Cooter,” Kenneth does a back flip into one of 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s elevators. (Flawlessly, this moment comes back later when one of Liz’s voicemails to Jack includes the exclamation, “What?! Kenneth just did a flip into the elevator!”) This is already pulled straight from the silly brain of Fey enough as it is. But if that elevator moment had happened a couple seasons later (you know, around the time Jenna has the power of flight), Kenneth wouldn’t have needed to flip to get to the higher floor on time. He could’ve just closed his eyes and blipped up there in a half second — like a cartoon character.
The Looney Tunes element to the show is what so many people still love about the brilliance of 30 Rock to this day. In the same way that Bugs Bunny rarely interacted with Roadrunner rarely interacted with Tweety Bird (featured once on Mandrell’s underwear), so too do the characters of 30 Rock. Grizz (Grizz Chapman) and Dot Com (Kevin Brown) meet with Frank and Lutz (John Lutz) infrequently. Kenneth and Cerie (Katrina Bowden) rarely have anything to do with one another. Jack only interacts with Toofer (Keith Powell) when he has to. All of the characters comprise the “TGS” setting and they help make it feel complete. But their stories are often segmented to allow their antics to fully flourish without having to serve the beats of an episode’s alternative plots.
30 Rock was so dense in its writing that it was easy to take for granted how brilliant many of the broader aspects of the show were. For one, Liz Lemon is a great character name. It just is. For another, the show’s willingness to shoot on location at the actual 30 Rock always allowed viewers to feel, as much as they possibly could with the buffoonery, that these sorts of misadventures were actually taking place at SNL behind the scenes and in the show’s storied history, only Fey had ever possessed the courage to slop light on them.
This wasn’t quite the case, but there were many elements to 30 Rock that were so distinctly Fey that only she could have pulled them off. And much of 30 Rock could have only ever existed on NBC. Aside from the myriad product placements and TV history gags, 30 Rock relied on NBC’s willingness to let them get away with a plethora of besmirchments against the network. Thankfully, they knew it was all in good fun.
In “Rosemary’s Baby,” the NBC page program is taken down a couple pegs when an underground network of consiglieres and fight clubs are revealed. (NBC treats the program like it’s one of the nation’s most prestigious traditions when it’s actually aggressively outdated. Like, oh I don’t know, how Disney views the Disney College Program.) Or in “SeinfeldVision,” when Donaghy begins his series-long mockery of the kinds of shows NBC was greenlighting at the time. Because of this openness to anything, though, NBC might have been the only network who would have ever allowed something like 30 Rock to exist.
I’m grateful that NBC let it happen, especially when it seemed like the show could be canceled at any moment, in spite of its immense critical love and consecutive hardware tallies. Every episode began with that whimsical Jeff Richmond music that promised tomfoolery and scheming in Jenna’s sly look to cam-er-ah, Frank’s finger point, and Jack’s hair flip. Granted, much of this tomfoolery had to do with the NBC News team, like when the acting bug chomped on Brian Williams and Meredith Vieira harassed Kenneth with unripe bananas. (Again, only NBC could have permitted this back in the day.) But on occasion, this tomfoolery included the live episodes.
30 Rock was not the first TV production satire to toy with its form (The Larry Sanders Show would do so on occasion), but it was the only one to do it in the absurd, goofy manner that became synonymous with the “TGS” gang. The live episodes were a massive part of that.
Right out of the gate in “Live Show,” the new look is addressed by comparing it to a Mexican soap opera. From there, Tina and Alec are at full speed ahead (“Flowers for sale!” sent a roar throughout the audience that reminded me comedy with a group is always excellent, like when I saw Long Shot in theaters) and they’re such gifted sketch performers that it always works — almost flawlessly. The rest of the cast holds their own, too. Tracy had SNL experience, sure, but McBrayer, Krakowski, Scott Adsit (Pete Hornberger), Maulik Pancholy (Jonathan) — they’re all seasoned veterans out there.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Lorne Michaels-produced live event without a slew of remarkable guest stars. (When people like Tom Hanks, Mr. Met, and Robert De Niro show up for guest spots, it has to be because of Lorne, Fey, or the New York shooting location, right?) The live shows featured Matt Damon as Carol Burnett (hilariously getting in on Liz’s surprise party), Will Forte as Paul L’Astname, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Amy Poehler as Young Liz, Jimmy Fallon as Young Jack, Glover as Young Tracy, Jon Hamm as any character they felt like, and Chris Parnell as the best recurring character, “Doctor” Leo Spaceman (who keeps his medical practice on the side). The whole gang would’ve been there if only the wiener slave had shown up! On any other show, this many cameos would be gluttonous and out-of-sync. On 30 Rock and TGS, it was just another Thursday/Friday night.
It was such a thrilling idea when 30 Rock pulled off the live idea not once, but twice. It was just so impossible to imagine any other comedy doing a live episode. Parks and Rec was too story driven to rely on such an idea. The Scrubs sets were too vast. It was almost as if 30 Rock had been created for the exact purpose of one day nailing two live episodes. (I mean, Liz’s birthday and Jack’s sobriety is not really a story, but it works well enough for the skeleton of the first installment. The second doesn’t even pretend to be about anything except jokes.) It remains one of my all-time favorite endeavors ever tackled by a television show. It belongs wholly to them.
When rewatching those live episodes, I felt immensely nostalgic. Not only did I take 30 Rock for granted back in the day, I took NBC’s entire Thursday night comedy lineup for granted. “Live Show” ends with Fey telling viewers it’s time for The Office before the look of the show returns to a taped version of Liz and Jack (kind of like in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” on Community). “Live from Studio 6H” ended with Fey telling fans to keep watching for Poehler’s helmed episode of Parks and Rec. All four of those shows used to air on the same night! We’ll never have anything like that again. But how special is it that we had it at all?
That’s how I try to think of 30 Rock. I don’t want to feel sad for the fact that its humor will never again be replicated (nor should it be). I want to celebrate that it existed. And had seven seasons!
I remember when I was a kid and I saw the episode, “Leap Day” for the first time. Man, I was obsessed with that episode. It’s still my favorite one. Back then, I showed it to all my friends because it just felt like it unlocked a newer, grander understanding of what comedy could be.
The construction of the character, Leap Day Williams, became an immediate comedy touchstone for me. At age fourteen, I was thrilled by the silliness of the character, sporting blue and yellow attire and a set of gills, bursting from the Mariana Trench every four years to trade candy for tears. With this episode, 30 Rock laid claim to an entire day (along with Amy Adams’ Leap Year rom-com) that brings the show back into the public consciousness every four years.
30 Rock didn’t stop with Kenneth donning the Leap Day attire and sending the spirit of the holiday out in the form of an old man to talk to Tracy, though. The episode’s writer, Luke Del Tredici, and director, Steve Buscemi (yes, that’s correct), also focused in on the NBC Universal ties by proclaiming that a Leap Day movie, “Leap Dave Williams” (starring Jim Carrey), had an all day marathon on USA every February 29. They shot entire scenes with Carrey as Dave Williams and then went the next step by shooting transitional bumpers and logo fanfare with Carrey. It blew my mind.
I’d grown up with holiday movies like The Santa Clause, A Christmas Carol, and It’s a Wonderful Life. I also have a strong appreciation for Groundhog Day. The entire construct of this joke was, maybe, three minutes, but it resulted in the parody of something I didn’t even know you could parody!
Of course, there’s more to the day that makes the episode a ton of fun. James Marsden as Criss Cross is at a Leap Day parade when he proclaims, “Real life is for March!” Tracy runs into Leap Day carolers and his “imaginary friend,” Dot Com. Kenneth warns about green rhubarb (“don’t eat them”) to Jack, who is already well-aware of Leap Day’s existence. It’s an extra day to take unusual chances and 30 Rock took one of their biggest swings with the episode. It was going, going, Greenzo. (Or, in this case, Bluezo and Yellowzo.)
While “Leap Day” was my favorite episode of 30 Rock, it did not quite host my favorite joke. That honor belongs to Kenneth and Jenna’s exchange in “Funcooker,” written by Glover. (In her memoir and my favorite book ever written, Bossypants, Fey describes it as an “MVP joke.”)
Kenneth: “What’s a back door brag?”
Jenna: “It’s sneaking something wonderful about yourself into everyday conversation. Like when I tell people, ‘It’s hard for me to watch American Idol because I have perfect pitch.’ Now you try.”
Kenneth: “It’s hard for me to watch American Idol ’cause there’s a water bug on my channel changer.”
It is a perfect microcosm of who Kenneth is. For as much as 30 Rock had fun with Muppets, Kenneth really was a Muppet come to life. He had a pure conception of the people around him that complemented his sinister world view. (“We’re gonna party like it’s 1999, which, according to my bible, is in seven years.”) He was an endearing blank slate smiling under the burdens of angelic immortality. And neither his hair nor his age were of any concrete importance.
Kenneth devoted his days at 30 Rock to doing whatever Tracy and Jenna asked of him, for better and for worse. (He did solely love everybody and television, after all.) I mean, Jenna was an attention-starved satire of the celebrity narcissism machine. She was so devoid of any semblance of reality that it almost seemed impossible to ever reason with her. Jenna had a tendency to replace normal human behavior with vain, performative gibberish. And for as much as Liz loathed sex, Jenna was obsessed with it. (Think of when Jack told her, “I want to Tupac you,” and she replied, “Fine, but I have to pee first.”)
And don’t think Tracy was any better. He was less vain and more aggressively stupid, though. Another celebrity satire, Tracy was an insane person who would fixate completely on the first thing somebody told him was important (unless that somebody was Liz). The only thing he ever cared about was when his world changed and the people he knew were just a way to return to the status quo. (He fully embraces Jack playing every member of his family, including Mrs. Rodriguez, but not before he moves to take his shirt off to have wild sex in which Donaghy would “play the matador.”) The best piece of art Tracy ever contributed was the “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” song because it contained the lyric, “Boys becoming men. Men becoming wolves.” Aside from that, there was no reason for Kenneth to ever care for these two monsters. And still he did. Because that’s what Kenneths do!
Kenneth would even strive to help Pete out from time to time, but it almost always resulted in a setback for the producer (widow?) Hornberger. Pete was always engaged in vague actions on the peripheries of the episodes and he low key might have been the show’s funniest character. (His shimmering line comes when Jenna is presumed dead by the Kids’ Choice Awards and he responds instantly, “I don’t feel anything. What’s wrong with me?”)
As funny as they were, though, the only characters to undergo any tangible changes throughout 30 Rock are Liz and Jack. Make no mistake, these two are cartoon characters, too. But they do actually have an arc. There wasn’t really a beating heart to 30 Rock, but if there was any love between characters, it was between Liz and Jack. As mutual mentors, they had a deep understanding of one another.
Jack, who could throw out wisdom (“Never go with a hippie to a second location”) faster than he could put on a tuxedo, was so devoted to the “conservative cause” that it almost seemed like he was putting on airs. His belief in bootstraps was to appeal to, say, Donald Trump or Roger Ailes. (“Outsourcing means cheaper toys at Christmas.”) But for all the qualities of the world — and of Liz — that Jack pretended to resent, we knew he secretly treasured them. He loved being a mentor and he loved knowing how every secret societal system in the world operated.
And who was a better candidate to mentor than Liz? Liz once said, “I know who I am. I know I’m not the funnest person in the group. I’m not the one you call when you want to go clubbing on the town and party dance all night.” Jack replied, “Why are you speaking like a Persian immigrant?”
A determined, self-deprecating “TGS” doormat whose life was a confident, Oprah-inspired mess, Liz always wanted to do what was best for herself, but she genuinely chose altruism at every turn. (“Remember when I asked that black guy if he’d seen Sideways?”) Can Liz have it all? If there’s an essential question on 30 Rock, it’s that one. Thanks to Jack, she realized that she could manage it. It was always within her. Jack was just the one to coax it out of her, just as she coaxed a more relaxed lifestyle out of him.
Many times a day, I wish 30 Rock was still around for our current cultural moment. Yes, it could’ve satirized Trump and Matt Lauer and all the easy, begging-to-be-toothless comedic targets. But I would’ve loved to see what it would’ve done with our dumber cultural controversies instead. Think John Krasinski selling Some Good News to CBS or the tired Die Hard holiday arguments or Martin Scorsese saying Marvel movies were theme parks and not cinema. Those are nuggets that are perfect inspirations for 30 Rock one-liners, if not outright episodes.
In a way, though, those Scorsese comments might have more to do with 30 Rock than Thor: The Dark World. Spending time in the hyper-cartoon world of 30 Rock was like going to the amusement park. It’s filled with sugar and colors and thrill rides. Was any show more fun to spend time with than 30 Rock? The growth of the story never mattered on 30 Rock and it never matters on roller coasters themed to Superman either. It’s just about having fun. It’s about enjoying whip smart laughs. It’s about embroiling yourself in a wacky Funcooker.
