The first of two new episodes of 30 Rock prominently featured just about everything I’ve complained about in these posts. As the show itself acknowledged, it was predicated on a love triangle straight out of Three’s Company. In true 30 Rock fashion, it served up a hoary sitcom cliché with an ironic, meta-textual spin as Jack is caught between two fantastic women: Julianne Moore’s Nancy Donovan, a sassy, foul-mouthed broad from Boston and Elizabeth Banks’ Avery Jessup, a sleek, ruthless beauty who doesn’t just talk a good game about looking like a slutty Grace Kelly: she backs that shit up.
In another of my pet peeves, the episode dealt extensively with Liz Lemon’s supposed unattractiveness and sprint to spinsterdom and featured wacky business involving the writers in the form of Toofer growing apoplectic upon discovering that he was an affirmative action hire. Yes, I should have despised tonight’s episode yet I enjoyed just about every minute of it.
Why? Because I found it very funny. And funny forgives just about everything, including kitten murder (both murdering kittens and murders committed by baby cats). It helps that the episode featured the return of two characters I quite enjoy, played by great actresses who also happen to be easy on the eyes.
Jack faced a stark choice tonight: does he pursue a sexy, sassy little number whose ambition and cold-blooded cunning matches, if not exceeds, his own, or does he choose a longtime crush his own age who hearkens back to his beantown roots? Jack’s romance with Nancy is sweet, endearing and as close to sentimental as 30 Rock gets while his fling with Avery is sexy, funny and blessed with explosive chemistry, a potent reminder that under his many layers of padding Alec Baldwin is still a handsome and virile man.
While Jack finds himself torn between two beautiful women, Liz Lemon’s romantic desperation leads her to pursue a wide array of singles activities in a mad bid to find that special someone. In the episode’s crowning moment, Liz delivers a passionate speech about what she’s looking for in a man that echoed/parodied Kevin Costner’s big monologue in Bull Durham. Tangential aside: Ron Shelton apparently wrote that monologue to attract a big name actor to the role by giving them something juicy to really sink their teeth into. He apparently thought the speech itself was way too long, self-indulgent and unnecessary to actually make it into the film. He was wrong.
Liz’s speech was a masterpiece of practical romanticism but the show undercut it by having her deliver her manifesto while being pelted with dodgeballs to a potential suitor who, unfortunately enough, was a non-English speaker who probably caught about every fifteenth word.
The Toofer-quits-over-being-a-token subplot could easily have gone nowhere but the show made it both funny and surprisingly thoughtful by using it as a springboard to discuss Affirmative Action and our society’s defiantly uneven playing field. After all, “This is America. None of us are supposed to be here.” Yet we all are, gloriously and improbably enough. I know I’ve said this before, but USA! USA! USA! And I love that Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels have a deep enough Rolodex that they can rope Will Ferrell into popping by for a very funny ten-second cameo as the star of a deplorable NBC show called Bitch Hunter. As a wise man once said, what a country!
The second episode wasn’t as funny or fresh as the first though it certainly had its share of laugh-out-loud moments. It was hampered primarily by a subplot involving a janitorial dispute that paralleled Jack’s romantic conundrum but really, really, really mirrored the whole Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien fiasco. Since Lorne Michaels is O’Brien’s mentor and longtime Executive Producer, you can guess what side of the Conan/Leno divide (then again is there any self-respecting comedy fan who throws down with Team Leno?).
When the premise was brought up I felt a surge of excitement and optimism. I thought the writers would come up with a smart new angle to attack the imbroglio but instead the joke began and ended with using a janitorial skirmish over turf as a clunky, obvious metaphor for the late-night wars.