30 Rock

For the creators of amazing telly, it must be dispiriting to have their programme described as a background show.  Yet the concept is well worn, particularly when we are stuck at home all the time.  For me, the background show is ideally shorter than half an hour in length and, typically, a comedy.  It might seem like a fall from grace for something like Friends, going from must-see TV premiers in primetime to something we can put on for a bit of chatter to drown out our thoughts while our attention is half-taken by chopping up vegetables or watering the houseplants.  But, it’s either a new way of appreciating an old favourite, as my journey reacquainting myself with South Park proved in its unfolding, or a perfectly apt way of discovering a new show, as I did with Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  It’s even more impressive if a background show can make you laugh out loud, and this week’s subject, 30 Rock, certainly did that to me.

Interestingly, to nobody but me, 30 Rock straddled both of these categories.  I remember watching the first series in some former stage of my life, enjoying the fast pace of the gags on gags, the perpetual irrelevance and the abundance of very very silliness (hello to you, Miranda).  Nobody knows why, despite the best efforts of scholars, but I never got any further.  Cue 2020/1 and I’m working from home every day, trying to make lunch breaks a thing by popping on an episode of my current background show while treating myself to one of life’s few remaining comforts: food.  There, among all the Sky boxsets, was dear old 30 Rock.  Surely I could get through all seven seasons simply because I have nothing else to do, unless you count staring in the mirror and weeping.  I’m here to report that, yes, I really did achieve my goal of watching all of it.

Scant research, by me, has revealed that the concept of 30 Rock is loosely based around the writers’ room of famous American cultural thing Saturday Night Live.  We don’t get that in the UK.  Our live thing on Saturday night is Strictly Come Dancing and that doesn’t have a writers’ room because, like a lot of British telly, there aren’t actually enough writers to go round that every show can fill its own room with them.  I suppose it depends on the room, though, as we could just be talking about the downstairs cloak.  In short, SNL (for short) is a parody sketch show of that week’s events featuring a celebrity guest host and a retinue of regular cast.  Within 30 Rock, our version of this is The Girlie Show but, as each series unfolds, we see hardly any of it.  Half the joke is that it’s bad and unfunny, cobbled together at the last minute despite the ineptitude of its writers and producers, while the rest of the humour comes from the lives of the characters trying to make it happen in the first place.

Our hero is Liz Lemon, played by creator Tina Fey.  I’m doing things arse-backwards here as I’ve already banged on about my Tina love in a previous post on her later creation Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.  Both shows have a lot in common, but one key difference is that Fey hardly appears in the latter.  Lemon, however, is our window into the TV sketch show production world, the only (relatively) normal and capable NBC employee trying to wrestle everyone else along to something approaching acceptable behaviour.  You’ll come to love her as much as you’ll love seeing her abused by co-workers, friends and family, often via flashbacks to her dweeby childhood and teenage years.  She’s all of us in later decades when we can’t be bothered to go out at night anymore (something I regret terribly now we’re not allowed to go out at all).

The pilot sets up her main foil, network executive Jack Donaghy.  Alec Baldwin has the time of his life as this right-wing conservative, sending up a variety of attitudes with charming affection and building over the series with Liz Lemon an almost perfectly symbiotic relationship.  Lemon, too, is thwarted by her cast.  Donaghy forces upon her Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan.  She must effectively parent this manchild and his entourage while keeping happy her best friend, Jenna Maroney, TGS’s original star whose nose is well and truly put out of joint by the arrival of Jordan.  At all times, Jane Krakowski’s performance is my favourite thing, as Maroney’s fame-hungry desperation, delusional attitude to ageing and uncompromising need for attention mark her out as a true kindred spirit, although I can’t sing and she can’t stop blurting out tunes at the slightest provocation.  The wider cast sets up constant jokes at the expense of various strata of American society, and then this is fleshed out to great effect by a steady stream of guest stars, from Mad Men’s Jon Hamm to Bojack Horseman’s Will Arnett.  I’m reserving special mentions for Rachel Dratch in various scene-stealing roles and for the character of Leo Spaceman, the world’s worst and therefore funniest medical professional.

And that’s the main conclusion to leave you with – this stuff is funny.  Some elements haven’t aged too well from 30 Rock’s 2006 beginnings, but we’ve had many intervening years to improve our society and so any reaction to bad taste simply shows you how far we’ve come.  The characters are strong, ridiculous and don’t even come close to running out of mileage.  The action is relentless and there’s never more than ten seconds without some sort of gag.  With even just half an eye on it while you move your mouse around on your laptop so it looks like you’re actively working from home, it can still guarantee you laughs.  So this still remains amazing telly, no matter what attention you’re paying it.