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"30 Rock hasn’t always been perfect, but it’s going out at or near the top of its game. Through all..."

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30 Rock hasn’t always been perfect, but it’s going out at or near the top of its game. Through all those seasons, it hasn’t drifted into outright mediocrity or badness, like most other comedies that last that long. It’s always tried to create innovative, fast-paced TV comedy, and if it failed a couple of times along the way, it was inevitably ready with an even better episode the next week to pick itself up.

[Shows like 30 Rock] are catnip to a certain kind of audience, the kind that prides itself on being able to catch all of the jokes and references, and is quick with a DVR rewind button to catch jokes missed when laughing too hard at a previous one. But they’re anathema to another, bigger audience, which continues to prefer the sort of gentle setup-punchline humor that’s dominated television comedy since the dawn of the medium.

Part of 30 Rock’s problem—but also its saving grace—has been its network. NBC kept it around because it won awards, it was owned by NBC’s parent company, and it looked good on the schedule, even if it didn’t draw many eyeballs. At the same time, NBC was falling apart when it launched, suffering an identity crisis in the wake of losing Friends and Frasier in the same year. […] This not only gave 30 Rock a great satirical target—as its characters actually work at NBC—but it also gave it the sorts of stakes other series about show business had lacked. The characters on 30 Rock know they’re making shitty TV, and they know they work for a shitty network. They’re just grateful for a job. In some ways, it’s fitting that even as NBC sits atop the to-date ratings in the important demographics this season, 30 Rock is on the way out. It almost wouldn’t work on a network that was successful, to say nothing of the way that a more successful network would have canceled it outright three or four episodes into season one.

That “anything for a laugh” mentality has also been the show’s Achilles’ heel from time to time. The problem with 30 Rock when it isn’t working has always been that the characters are so shallow and stereotypical that they become servants of the comedy, instead of the other way around. […] Yet the reason 30 Rock didn’t go wrong is because the show has always had an ace in the hole. In Liz Lemon (Fey) and Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), the show has an extremely strong comedic pairing, a goofy mentee-mentor relationship that has steered clear of unresolved sexual tension and made both characters stronger in ways that allow them to wander off to deal with the show’s less-defined figures.

Fey is as good as any TV writer at cramming her show full of jokes, but she’s equally good at finding ways to give them meaning.

Yes, the show probably feels less fresh now than it did then, but it’s seven years old. What’s most remarkable about 30 Rock is how it sped things up and seemed to change TV comedy, even while remaining connected to TV’s past, how it has found a way to pile joke on top of joke without losing itself, how it always course-corrects when it needs to, sometimes at the last minute. At its best—and at its worst—30 Rock is dedicated to having as many cakes as it can cram into a half-hour, then eating them too.


- Todd VanDerWerff, author at the AV Club. (x)

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