Oh my god. Jokes. So many jokes. Visual jokes. Spoken jokes. Smart jokes. Stupid jokes. Jokes that I still don't fully get and I've been watching and rewatching this show since I was 15 ("Yes Hornburger...."). 30 Rock is just a non-stop joke machine, with a gag-per-minute rate only matched by the sheer strength of its laughs. American sitcoms were in a good place in the mid-2000s, even if not all of them hold up today, but few of them feel as absolutely foundational as 30 Rock. And look, obviously not all of it has aged well, and there's some episodes that really jar on a rewatch but man, when this show is on point, there's few that can match it. Tina Fey burst out of the SNL writer's room like a comedic whirlwind, hoovering up headlines and trends and spinning them into 22 minute bursts of comedic perfection
It's TV satire at its most robust and flexible. Because it's set in the world of television (drawing from Tina Fey's experience as head writer on Saturday Night Live), it pretty much has carte blanche to poke fun at any trend in the entertainment industry. So what, it's only tied to whatever was going on in showbusiness from 2006 to 2013? Actually no, because the show is smart enough to hit broad concepts with specific jokes, allowing it to stay relevant and crucially, to stay funny. Take the episode where Jerry Seinfeld is digitally inserted into every show on the network. It's a bizarre concept that suddenly starts to feel a lot more familiar in an age of platforms full of interconnected content and a devout worship of the recognisable. Because TV never changes. Not really anyway. The shows vary all the time but the pitch is always the same. Just look at Netflix's recent promotion of Seinfeld, poking fun at their newfound right to use the comedian's image in any way they see fit. How far have we really come?
In many ways, we're the joke: the audience that lets TV get away with selling us the strangest and most inane things. It never gets fully nasty though, especially not when the show often incorporates the targets of its gags as closely as it possibly can, like the good natured ribbing of Aaron Sorkin, whose similar-in-premise but ultimately doomed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip gets a direct shoutout in one of many hilariously meta asides. 30 Rock is a comedy about an industry that needs to do better but knows that it doesn't have to. It's the kind of social commentary that would drive other shows to a bland and repetitive early cancellation but 30 Rock succeeds because right from the start, that kind of comedy is everywhere. The setting is the joke, the characters are the joke, every line of dialogue is the joke. It's a mirror to television that bounces every ounce of bullshit back at dizzying, screwball comedy speed
But even the jokes that aren't about the state of the box still know how to strike gold by focusing on one of the largest and most comically rich casts in sitcomdom. From the main players, like capitalism's wet dream Jack Donaghy, unhinged force of nature Tracey Jordan and the literally immortal intern Kenneth Parcell, to the murderer's row of guest stars mostly playing themselves, the lineup is truly formidable. The list is too long to go into, spanning everyone from Weird Al and Kim Kardashian to Buzz Aldrin and Kermit the Frog, by way of Tom Hanks, Robert de Niro and Paul McCartney, but the show always has the acid to stop it from feeling like a parade of namedrops. Fey is wise in how she deploys the famous faces, carefully preventing the audience from ever feeling like an onlooker at a schmoozy Big Apple party and using the star power to give the takedowns an added level of credibility. As far as the satire goes, it isn't a total upending of the system, but it does take shots from within, and ultimately I think that's the thing that gives it such staying power in terms of what it has to say about the industry
But the genius of the comedy, at least as far as the main cast is concerned, is how tightly Fey has nailed the characteristics of each of her regulars. This is incredibly specific comedy, with lines delivered in ways that only this particular set of actors could muster. That's a tricky feat; most sitcoms would call it a day once they've established a set of comic conventions for their world alone, but 30 Rock isn't content until every character has their own unique set of gags that are totally specific to who's playing them. Combine that great handle on characters with a surprising amount of sweetness that creeps out through the barrage of snark and you've got a show that, despite the odd creaky note, still feels as sharp and funny as it did when it aired
Ultimately, it's a show that just gets TV. It knows how redundant, lazy and cynical it can be, how the executives phone it in and trade on the low expectations of its audience. It knows how seedy and underhanded the industry truly is (for every joke that's aged poorly, there's another that's leagues ahead of its time), and how intrinsically linked to the evils of capitalism it is. It knows that TV is a cold-hearted, commercial business that only cares about what sells. It also knows why television is such an important medium, what keeps people coming back to it and talking about it and celebrating it. It knows the comfort that TV provides for so many people and knows the value that sitcoms have in reflecting our chaotic reality, and it obviously knows the value of a good laugh. Most importantly, it knows that these things never stop being true, and if the ending is anything to go by, 30 Rock is going to be relevant for a long time to come. After all, if these living cartoons can get a gorgeous, heartfelt farewell, then maybe there's hope for us all
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