I heart 30 Rock

Sunday, November 16, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I watched Saturday Night Live from its inception in the 70s, but over the years my attention went elsewhere. I have to admit that Dana Carvey and Eddie Murphy still seem like the new guys on SNL. So Tina Fey is absolutely foreign territory, and a bit intimidating. How dare the world move on! I was just getting used to Akroyd, Belushi, Newman, Radner, Chase, Murray and Curtin. 

But like everyone else, I fell in love with Tina Fey for helping us laugh at the tragic comedy the election had turned into. We needed someone to help us deal with the possibility that the idiot woman would become the new vice-president. Someday we'll tell each other that there was a real possibility that we'd elect Palin, remember her? (One can hope.) 

Then I listened to the FreshAir interview with Fey, and found out a lot, including that she isn't an impersonator, and that she had a show, 30 Rock, that was struggling -- but many people thought it was the best thing on TV. That's something I'm interested in, because Fey as Palin was riveting. I wanted more of that. Dave Davies, the FreshAir TV critic said he hoped that would happen, so I watched an episode from (the current) Season 3, and found it fairly uninteresting. Even so, I decided to try Season 1, at the beginning, and that's the nugget! It really is great TV.  

It's not often that you laugh out loud at a sitcom. So much so that I can't remember the last time I watched a 1/2 hour sitcom (except for Entourage, which I think is actually the best show on TV right now, and I don't think of it as a sitcom, but I'm not sure exactly what category it would fit in). But 30 Rock is everything a great sitcom is supposed to be. It's like Mary Tyler Moore. We love the heroine, Liz Lemon and come to love the grumpy boss Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin), and the show is studded with celebrity guests from Seinfeld as himself, Paul Rubens as an Austrian prince, Robin Williams as a NY street bum and Carrie Fisher as a washed-up vision of the future Liz Lemon. You almost get the idea that all the great comics and actors love 30 Rock so much that they want to pitch in to help give it a future. 

Now I gotta say that Season 1 is much better than Season 2. The show really had a spark in its first year, and it faded in the second year, which I'm not yet finished with. I hope it gets back on track, but it's still worth watching. And that its a struggling show says more about the state of broadcast TV these days than the quality of the writing and acting, which is as good as it gets.