30 Rock – Seasons 1 & 2

Archived review

Let me get this straight; Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was a good show. It had an unfulfilled potential to be a great show. Yet as I was watching it, it seems strange that there was a similarly-themed show that started airing at exactly the same time and that was addressing all the problems I had with Studio 60's overblown sense of importance, and I didn't even know it. Well, I'm caught up with two seasons of 30 Rock now, and I'm very glad I did. It's one of the strangest comedies I've seen, being a complete hotpot of different styles. At times clever political satire, at times touching-without-being-schmaltzy drama, and often a refreshingly silly concoction of irreverence and slapstick, 30 Rock primarily gets it so right by making anything game and not taking itself at all seriously, even when it's trying to make a serious point.

It helps to have one of the better ensembles of recent years, with Tracy Morgan and Jack McBrayer in particular shining as ridiculously black Tracy Jordan and ridiculously white Kenneth respectively. The real stars however are Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin who have such a great mostly-platonic camaraderie between them, and whose creative differences really make the show interesting. In portraying sketch show producer Liz Lemon, Fey provides the necessary stable grounding of a relatively sane person in an insane environment, but like Scrubs' JD before her, has enough funny quirks to make her character very memorable indeed (particularly her tastes in both men and food). Speaking of memorable, however… Alec Baldwin is amazing. Having surprisingly not seen him in much else, yet knowing of his reputation as a serious actor, I wasn't expecting to find him as Godlike as he's turned out to be, but everything he says as uber-capable executive extraordinaire is solid gold. Watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTj47rcuM-4 to see what I mean. Genius.

This is another show I can't wait to see back on the screen again, and definitely still has a lot of life in it. Baldwin roolz!