After half a season mostly spent touring the furthest reaches of distant galaxies, this week 30 Rock turned out an episode that was well within spitting distance of Spaceship Earth. It wasn't The Middle or anything, but it was pretty grounded, at least by the standards of recent 30 Rock episodes, That is to say, the actors seemed to be playing the characters they'd signed on to play all those years ago, instead of random accumulations of bizarre traits and assorted weirdness, and the surreal horror-movie imagery and elaborate mythologies for imaginary holidays were kept to a minimum. Even the preposterously over-famous guest stars—Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Patti LuPone—were playing actual roles, not performing campy little stunts or showing what good sports they are. Not that there weren't interruptions in what I, being a good sport myself, will call the "story," for satirical interludes. One of these was a clip from Jenna's cop-shop pilot Goodlooking, in which she played “Alexis Goodlooking, who was also good-looking, and my special ability was being good at looking for clues.” In the clip, Jenna stands over a dead body and barks out orders to the crime-scene technicians. “Maybe the perp's in the system,” she says, and then, turning broody, she adds, “unlike my husband's killer, who got away, and it haunts me.” It was funny, but it wasn't any more ridiculous than Unforgettable.
Jena slips back into character as the “tough but pretty” detective so that she can solve the mystery of who drank Pete's birthday bottle of scotch, which he'd been planning to share with the writing staff. (Tracy settled easily into the role of her unhelpful but game sidekick. His own qualifications for the post were established with a clip from one of those movies that inspired the sketch about a battle between two magical Negroes on this week's Key & Peele. Wearing a white wig and outlined against a sky the color of wino piss, he looked down at a little white boy and said, “America's kind of like this crabapple tree, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”) I had more fun watching Jane Krakowski tonight than I have in a while. Sure, it helped that she wasn't required to be joined at the hip to Will Forte, a man, who, to my possibly mistaken eyes, does for comedy what the Jonestown massacre did for Kool-Aid sales. But I also had the feeling that Krakowski really enjoyed the chance to do something different from acting like an unhinged, slutty narcissist and saying cringe-worthy things with a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes. A possible alternate explanation is that I just really enjoyed the chance to see her do something different.
Jenna actually does a solid job of cracking the case, not that it would have taxed the investigative abilities of Hercule Poirot, or for that matter, Inspector Clouseau. It's never hard to deduce who's probably responsible for a cruel, shameless act of outright theft when there are writers around. As Lutz explains, “We wanted booze, but we didn't want to hang out with Pete. It's the worst. he always brings out his guitar and sings. He's got one story, and it's about seeing Phil Donahue at a mall!” Fair but cruel, Jenna sentences the sticky-fingered writers to hang out with Pete, which gives Scott Adsit a chance to bring out his guitar and sing, just as Lutz had direly predicted. “And Phil Donahue's walking past Cinnabon,” he howls, to a melody lifted from “Piano Man.” “And he's making eye contact with me/ I can tell that he'll smile, and stay for a while/ And say, 'Pete, you're who I want to be!'” It's nice to see him so happy.
The episode wasn't all about crime and punishment. Love was given its due as well. We got another chapter in the story of Jack and Kenneth, which is unexpectedly shaping up as one of the great bro-mances of our time. (I guess somebody had to pick up the slack now that Barney has discovered sincere true love on How I Met Your Mother. He discovers it with a different woman every week, but still.) Still trying to find Kenneth a new job at the network, Jack has a brainstorm and hooks him up with Standards & Practices. Unsurprisingly, Kenneth takes to the role of censor like a buzzard to fresh roadkill and is soon happily tearing through scripts for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, excising offensive terms such as “Dick Wolf.”