“30 Rock” ran for seven seasons and 138 episodes on NBC, from October 11, 2006, to January 31, 2013. Tina Fey created it, wrote herself into the lead, and built a sitcom about the machinery of a late-night sketch show that was, in practice, about the machinery of NBC itself.
That last part is why it still holds up. The show’s real subject was never Liz Lemon’s love life. It was the corporation that owned her.
Trailer, via 30 Rock Official.
Liz Lemon and the Page in the Hallway
Fey plays Liz Lemon, head writer and showrunner of TGS with Tracy Jordan, a live sketch comedy series produced in the fictional Studio 6H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The title refers to the real address: 30 Rockefeller Plaza, home to NBC Studios and Saturday Night Live. Fey based the premise on her own time as SNL’s head writer, and the show never let you forget the debt.
Liz supervises a cast and crew of egos. Jane Krakowski plays Jenna Maroney, the show’s star and Liz’s best friend. Jack McBrayer plays Kenneth Parcell, the page. Scott Adsit, Judah Friedlander, Keith Powell and Maulik Pancholy fill out the writers’ room and the executive corridor.
In the first episode, network executive Jack Donaghy, played by Alec Baldwin, forces Liz to hire the unpredictable Tracy Jordan as co-star. Tracy Morgan plays Jordan. That forced marriage — cautious writer, chaotic star, corporate boss standing over both — is the engine the series runs on for seven years.
Jack Donaghy Against the Liberal Writer
The show’s most reliable comic structure is the argument between Jack and Liz. Baldwin’s Jack is conservative; Liz is liberal. Episodes return to that disagreement again and again, and the writing treats neither side as simply correct. Jack is a network executive, which means he is usually wrong about art and occasionally right about everything else.
Around them, the show stacks its other running threads. Jenna wants to be a film star. Tracy behaves like a child. The characters date, break up, and circle each other. None of it is the point.
The point is the building. 30 Rock was produced by Lorne Michaels’s Broadway Video and Fey’s Little Stranger, in association with NBCUniversal. Most episodes used a single-camera setup and were filmed in New York. The show made a habit of parodying the corporate structure of NBC and its parent companies, General Electric and Comcast.
In later seasons, the network gets acquired by Kabletown, a Philadelphia-based media company. That is a fictionalized version of Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal. The show turned its own ownership into a plot.
A Live-Action Cartoon
Critics and the show’s own writers described 30 Rock as “a live-action cartoon,” and the label is accurate. The series was known for cutaways, sight gags, and breaking the fourth wall. It used surreal humor the way other sitcoms used punchlines — constantly, and without apology.
That style is influential, and the influence is easy to trace: the show proved a network sitcom could be dense, fast, and strange without losing a mass audience. It also proved the format could absorb a joke about microwave ovens and a joke about Comcast in the same minute.
The casting was as deliberate as the writing. Fey’s first act as casting director was to cast herself as Liz Lemon, a character said to be much like Fey when she first became head writer at SNL. Morgan was next. He was a former castmate of Fey’s, and he said the role was “right up [his] alley and it was tailor made for [him].”
McBrayer was written into the part of Kenneth from the start. Fey knew him from Second City in Chicago and said she “really wanted him for that part and was very happy when no one objected.”
The Jenna Maroney Switch
The one genuinely uncomfortable chapter is Jenna. Rachel Dratch, Fey’s longtime comedy partner and fellow SNL alumna, was originally cast in the role and played it in the original pilot. In August 2006, Krakowski was announced as her replacement. Dratch stayed with the show in various side characters.
Fey’s explanation was that Dratch was better suited to a variety of side characters, and that the role of Jenna needed a straight-ahead acting part. Fey said, “Rachel and I were both very excited about this new direction.”
Dratch did not share that framing. She said she was unhappy with the media’s depiction of the change as a demotion, and she was skeptical of the reasons she was given. She was also unhappy about the reduction in the number of episodes she would appear in. After the first season, she was used only sporadically.
Rachel and I were both very excited about this new direction.
That is the show’s one real cost, and it is worth naming. A performer who helped build the thing got moved to the edges of it, and the public story about why never quite matched.
What the Awards Actually Measure
30 Rock won Outstanding Comedy Series at the Primetime Emmys in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and was nominated every other year it ran. Across its run it drew 103 Primetime Emmy nominations. It appeared on many critics’ year-end best-of lists.
The awards are real, and they are also the least interesting thing about the show. A sitcom that wins three consecutive series Emmys is not a discovery. What matters more is that 30 Rock was willing to make its own parent company the butt of the joke, season after season, while that company paid for the cameras.
The show’s weakness is the same as its strength. The density that makes a great episode rewatchable makes a mediocre one exhausting. When the cutaways land, they land hard. When they do not, the episode is a pile of references moving fast. Seven seasons is a long time to sustain that pace, and the later run leans harder on the bit.
The published audience score sits at 7.5 out of 10 across 845 votes. That feels about right, and slightly low. 30 Rock is not a perfect show — the Jenna recasting left a mark, and the surrealism occasionally substitutes for character. But it is a show that understood something its peers did not: that the funniest thing in a television building is the people who own it.
7.5 of 10.
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