Writing about 30 Rock has gotten a whole lot easier and less painful since I started adjusting my expectations accordingly. I’ve found that it makes more sense to appreciate 30 Rock for what it is rather than what I’d like it to be, namely the laugh-out loud masterpiece of its first and second year.
Tonight’s episode was very funny even if it regularly erred on the side of broadness. I found myself chuckling at certain gags I found fairly stupid and goofy, like Jack going through all the stages of grief in slow motion in less than a minute and Tracy threatening to show Liz the back of his hand. Except instead of slapping her he displayed a little post-it note asking her to be nice to him.
Yes, “Argus” was all kinds of silly but in a very winning way. For example, Jack learned tonight that his mentor Don Geiss had left him a peacock, or as Kenneth memorably dubbed it, a “swamp eagle”, in his will. That would be ridiculous enough even if Jack didn’t become convinced that the peacock was inhabited by the soul of his late friend. It was a patently ridiculous notion but Alec Baldwin is such a superlative actor and his relationship with Don Geiss so richly fleshed-out that it was actually strangely poignant that Jack thought an ornery old executive with both a secret Canadian and a secret attic family, was reincarnated in the body of a flamboyantly colored bird.
Remarkably, the Don Geiss-as-peacock subplot wasn’t even the wackiest of the evening. No, that dubious honor belonged to a thread about Jenna falling in love with her dream man: a Jenna impersonator played by Will Forte. Like Will Ferrell before him (dude, they even have the same initials), Forte throws himself into playing bizarre characters with almost scary conviction: there's no distance or irony. Tonight was no exception so there was something at once funny and deeply unnerving about the idea of Jenna making out with her exact double. Only, you know, with a penis and more pronounced Adam’s Apple.