The Ten Best 30 ROCK Episodes of Seasons One & Two

[TMC]

The Ten Best 30 ROCK Episodes of Season One

We’re settling back into the 2000s with 30 Rock, another one of that decade’s finest samples and a worthy companion to The Office, which also occupied a long-time berth on NBC’s Thursday night sitcom lineup that both shows helped resurrect. Like The Office, 30 Rock is great because it’s got the right mix of the “old” and the “new” — offering a compelling blend of traditional, even clichéd sitcom constructs with a sexy stylistic modernity. No, that modernity isn’t in the form of an omnipresent mockumentary framing as on The Office, but via a similarly metatheatrical “wink” resulting from both a showbiz premise and explicit creative ties to Saturday Night Live and the topical, satirical, exaggerated humor associated with that classic sketch comedy series. These SNL ties stem from 30 Rock’s creator and star Tina Fey, who had spent nearly a decade as a writer and eventually major player on that late-night institution, the only dominant remnant of the comedy-variety genre that had once been so ubiquitous in primetime television during the 1950s-1970s as a parallel to the situation comedy (which, going back to radio, actually owed part of its own identity to the comedy-variety form; you can read more about that in my book). With Fey’s sketch-comedy sensibilities guiding its scripting and performance, 30 Rock – its single-cam setup aside (a common choice for “backstagers” that was also now de rigueur for a sitcom seeking critical respect amidst the multi-cam’s dwindling cachet in the late 2000s) — would indeed often come to look and sound like SNL. Such comparisons were not merely unavoidable, they were intentional, enabled by a premise set behind the scenes of a comedy-variety show produced in NBC’s famous 30 Rockefeller Plaza building, where Fey’s character Liz Lemon worked as her program’s head writer. In other words, this was semi-autobiographical – Fey cast herself as the scribe of a sketch show called TGS, obviously modeled on the sketch show for which she had truly written. Most of the audience knew that fact, and 30 Rock, produced by SNL overlord Lorne Michaels’ company, naturally situated its very identity on this affiliation with sketch comedy, and Saturday Night Live’s sketch comedy, in particular.

The Six Best 30 ROCK Episodes of Season Two

With the main characters well-established after a fast-moving first season that refined their comedic depictions both as individuals and as pieces within an ensemble, 30 Rock goes into its confident second season able to focus elsewhere — accelerating a bolder, more imaginative, and ultimately more situationally-validating comic sensibility reflective of the show’s SNL heritage, thereby allowing it a firmer command on its identity in full. While the series’ emotional core — Liz and Jack’s friendship — gets reinforced effortlessly throughout the year’s episodic and long-form plots as a premised anchor, and every lead is afforded weekly moments of uproarious ha-has in accordance with their known personas, the writing itself has also become faster, more topical, and more parodic of the media landscape at large — again, more in keeping with SNL and the idea-driven sketch comedy style warranted both by the premise and those explicit ties embedded within its DNA. This makes the proceedings fresher and funnier — no other sitcom can boast this ethos — and with support from a sturdy design that now knows how to best uphold its situation comedy, I think Two is indeed 30 Rock’s best season as a sitcom.