30 Rock joins the scant list of decent stateside sitcoms unspoiled by the sycophantic laughter of a studio audience, humbly wearing the rare and stealthy attribute of being silly without being childish. Not since Scrubs has such a line been walked, with chunky, cartoonish characters as accessible in their quirks as they are endearing in their longevity.
The jokes too have that dizzying habit of cutting back and forth between surreal fantasies and fragments of tomfooleries past and, like Scrubs (and by necessity every sitcom ever to come from America), each episode is vaguely arched by a lesson learned or a character-building moral. Unlike its counterparts however, 30 Rock never leaves you feeling goaded or patronised. Their lessons are not the stodge that bogs down the broth but a mere side dish, rightly overshadowed by the sheer onslaught of the bizarre and the hysterical.
This must all come naturally to the creators, the show being a daring introspective of the very processes upon which it relies. It is, after all, a TV show about a TV show, following the adventures of a team of writers, producers, performers and executives as they struggle to hold together a prime-time light entertainment show on NBC – the tongue-in-cheek send-up of Saturday Night Live being a little more conspicuous to its native audience.
It is by all accounts the brainchild of SNL veteran Tina Fey, whose enchanting charisma has never exactly made for a convincing portrayal of neurotic, slobby, undesirable head writer Liz Lemon, but one could never accuse the show of attempting realism. Libertarian pin-up Alec Baldwin is in hog’s heaven playing Republican fat cat executive Jack Donaghy. Once again their “will they won’t they” tenterhooks remain buried under their respective love quests, as Jack struggles between two women (recurring guest stars Julianne Moore and Elizabeth Banks) and Liz’s quest for the unobtainable perfect ‘astronaut Mike Dexter’ of her dreams is dissolved in a slow motion non-starter with her “settling soul mate”, the awkward and luckless Wesley (Michael Sheen), then abruptly truncated when she meets her match with pilot Carol (Matt Damon.)
Meanwhile, borderline psychotic actress Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) breaks down then up again as we finally meet her mother (Jan Hooks) and scatterbrained urban hipster Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) demands a baby daughter before going on a never-ending quest to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. As always, however, it’s the impenetrably good-natured page Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer) who gets all the best lines: “As mom used to say, you can’t eat love”, “When the Parcells first came to America, they lived in a town called Sexcriminalboat.”, My grandfather was a monkey? If that’s true, why was he killed by a monkey?”.
As you can see, there is more than a dabbling of satire going on, but like the moral insistence it is never in-your-face but a mere small cog in a surreptitiously complex mirth machine. Even if you don’t laugh out loud, it’s hard not to appreciate the silver cloud of eccentric horseplay in which 30 Rock suspends you.
Released on DVD on Monday 14th February 2011 by Universal.