30 Rock

With the series finale at hand, Jaime Weinman explains what it did so well

Hint: it’s certainly more than 2008, and definitely more than 2004

A show can be a hit, but if its viewers are over 49, chances are it’ll get the axe

There are a couple of things worth looking out for when it comes to U.S. TV ratings this week. Last week two shows did pretty well in “death” slots that were widely expected to endanger them, and if they can keep it up this week, and for a little while longer, it might mean that the networks have stumbled on a new-ish scheduling technique.

One thing I didn’t mention in my 30 Rock post below is that because I don’t consider it a genuinely great show, I enjoy almost every episode. (I’ve even enjoyed the ones that most people found really disappointing, like the Steve Martin episode.) I think of it as a show that isn’t really going to achieve transcendent greatness, so I tune in expecting to get a few laughs, which it always manages to provide. It’s a reliably entertaining show. I think all of us have shows that we just enjoy, without worrying overmuch about whether they’re truly great. That is what television largely consists of, anyway.

Why it’s never been great and is probably as good as it’s ever going to be

Well, there isn’t a lot to say about them, since they mostly gave the awards to the same people as last year. I keep thinking that the Emmys’ preference for Mad Men and especially 30 Rock signifies a certain preference for hard-hearted coldness on the part of the Emmy voters. For some, Mad Men is easier to admire than to love, and encourages a certain amount of audience distance from the subject, characters and time period (though there’s a very valid counter-argument that the distancing effects don’t actually preclude emotional involvement, they just make us look at the issues in a more clear-eyed way). And 30 Rock is sort of a technocratic comedy, where the joke writing is on a high level, but almost every character is a cartoonish lunatic. The closest thing the show has to a human being is Jack, who — and I’m sorry for repeating myself — has become the show’s straight man and voice of sanity as Liz has become a complete psycho. Its lack of mainstream success is no more surprising than that of Arrested Development, another extremely well-crafted comedy that didn’t have a lot of characters who bore much resemblance to human beings.

I think 30 Rock‘s last big meta-joke, about the fact that a “year” on TV ends when the season does (“What are you talking about? It’s May!”), is my favourite joke about the end of the regular season. The most famous is probably this one, where an episode was literally stopped in mid-story by the arrival of the summer hiatus, but like a number of jokes from Moonlighting, it maybe goes a little overboard with the fourth-wall-breaking. Though what made it famous was the moment at the end when it turns out that while everybody else is an actor on the series, “David” and “Maddie” are apparently real people who will continue having unresolved sexual tension throughout their separate vacations. That’s the sort of meta-humour that can make your head explode if you think about it too much.

Some Friday comedy thoughts:

– 30 Rock really seems to have gone all the way over to making Liz the crazy person and Jack the straight man. Earlier this season I felt like they were alternating, but now I feel like Jack is the most “normal” member of the group, reacting to Liz’s insanity (“Why don’t I have any other friends?”). Last night all three stories revolved in some way around Liz being insane, screwing up, embarrassing herself, or being unable to distinguish between life and the movies. She has become the early Michael Scott, even as Michael Scott himself has become more sympathetic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cph2QjATgeo