30 Rock // Current

The Language of 30 Rock

Since its debut in 2006, there hasn’t been a more quotable comedy than 30 Rock.... more

jennyschu
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Germans love David Hasselhoff but 30 Rock Bombs in the ratings. Go figure.

Here in America, critics and audiences are under the spell of Tina Fey’s comedy 30... more

hpseaton
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The Language of 30 Rock

"Since it’s debut in 2006, there hasn’t been a more quotable comedy than 30 Rock.... more

St_Alia_10191
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That's Gay: Gayngels

It's a well-known fact that when you need help fast, a gay guy magically appears to... more

bryan_safi
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infoMania: Best clips from week of Sept. 3

This week on infoMania the Daytime Emmys bring home the award for lamest award show,... more

infoMania
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This Is New York -- Manhattan - Rockefeller Center

This is a shot facing North from the top of Rockefeller Center, AKA 30 Rock. This is... more

TomHunter
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Women Over 35 Are Ugly & Unfunny?

Apparently, the answer is "yes" in Hollywood more and more. Here, famous comediennes... more

MEnglish
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Emmys a Virtual Whiteout. Again.

Another year, another mostly lily-white prime-time Emmy nomination list from the... more

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Good morning, Emmy: Stars react to this year's leading television award nominations

Nominations for the 61st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards gave two of television's most... more

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Where have all the Loose Women Gone?

This is a really amusing article from Esquire men's magazine that goes over a bunch of TV and music stereotypes about smart woman and how they are portrayed as divorced from sex. I laughed.

Brilliant, funny, and powerful women are retreating from sex as never before, and if you don't believe it, take the curious case of Liz Lemon. The most complicated and intelligent woman in television comedy barely ever has sex. She doesn't sit on laps, either — "not a lap sitter," she tells one handsome date she brings home in the first season. (He turns out to be her cousin.) She admits to losing her virginity at twenty-five and accidentally reveals that she doesn't believe people can have intercourse standing up. Liz Lemon's low libido is one of 30 Rock's running gags, like the writers' obsession with junk food or Jack Donaghy's use of words like "upward-revenue-stream dynamics." When Jenna asks about sex with her beeper-salesman boyfriend, Liz replies, "Fast and only on Saturdays — it's perfect." That line is a dagger in the heart of every thinking heterosexual man in America, and for Liz and the like-minded career women in The Women, He's Just Not That Into You, Sandra Bullock's latest, The Proposal, or just about any other chick flick of late, it's become achingly clear that sex is usually the last thing on their minds.

How did this happen? A mere decade ago, Seinfeld's Elaine Benes was hilarious, smart, familiar with Russian novelists, an aggressive and demanding professional, and a woman who fooled around a lot. The Sex and the City fantasia of fin de siècle Manhattan broke women's desires into separable components — status, career, money — but sooner or later every conversation between the four principals came back to who's doing what with whom, how well, and how often.

So if these women don't want sex, what do they want? Freud's immortal question — like "Why is there something instead of nothing?" — isn't so much a request for knowledge as a hope that such knowledge exists. Six hundred years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales told the story of a knight who is sent on a quest to find the answer to that very mystery. For a year, he asks every woman he meets, all of them giving competing and contradictory versions of happiness. When the quest is over and the knight is forced to come up with something, he answers, "Sovereignty." Women want power and to be whom they want to be, and for Chaucer, the first use of that power was power in the sack. The story is told by the Wife of Bath, a good-time girl who wears out five husbands in bed and is hungrily searching for a sixth.

Over the years, as women became educated and gained control over their lives, they wanted more stuff, more choices, more men. If you have a great-grandmother, ask her and she'll tell you: The chance to try people out for a while before you marry them is one of the best things that happened in the twentieth century. But the post-post-feminist maelstrom that is Danica Patrick and the Real Housewives of Wherever and Secretary Clinton versus Beauty Queen Palin means that women can wield real power, but it comes at the cost of confusion — professional, social, and sexual. Sex has become a minefield just too tricky to navigate as they build a career or a family or a reality-TV-show franchise. They go elsewhere.

Which is a disaster for men. Until now, feminism has been the best thing that ever happened to us, because it means we get to sleep with people rather than ciphers. And in some places in the world, feminism is still working that magic....Here in America, with the battle of the sexes more or less over, women now have to struggle against the tide of money fixation and status obsession that threatens to turn them into mannequins distinct from the plastic variety only insofar as they can pose themselves. And for men, it's a struggle against the despair we face when looking over the pickings of the bar, thinking, "They're all the same" because they are.This is a really amusing article from Esquire men's magazine that goes over a bunch... more

catchiecoo
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30 Rock's weird conservative streak.

30 Rock will have its Season 3 finale next week, and, barring an unforeseen plummet in viewership, the curtains will close on some good news. The first and second seasons averaged 5.8 million and 6.4 million viewers a show, while the typical Season 3 episode has brought in more than 7 million. That's a small but happy triumph for a series that's flirted with oblivion since its start—even if it's a triumph many onlookers saw coming. This season premiered just a month after Tina Fey crafted her devastatingly ditzy Sarah Palin impression on SNL and became, for a spell, the fourth-most-famous woman in American politics. It was all but guaranteed that Fey's newfound celebrity would give her baby a boost.
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It's surprising, though, what a small role party politics has played on 30 Rock this season. There were no Palin riffs. Despite Bobby Jindal's widely mocked resemblance to Kenneth the page, there was no send-up of the Louisiana governor. Even nods to Barack Obama's win have been scarce: a glancing reference to Michelle Obama's "smug smile" here (courtesy of the show's resident Republican, Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy), a short, strange "Flavor Obama" bit there. This is surprising not just because of Fey's election-season success but because politics figured so heavily in the show's first two seasons. Jack dated Condoleezza Rice and went to work for George Bush; scripts were regularly packed with enough Dennis Kucinich, Mitt Romney, and universal health care punch lines to rival a Colbert Report monologue. But politics is still very much part of 30 Rock's DNA. The show's central tension remains the tug of war between Fey's Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy. Their head butting doubles as an argument about the viability of liberal ideals and the allure of a pragmatic, colder-eyed conservatism—and it's remarkable how often the show sides with the latter.

The terms of the debate are established in the pilot. Whereas Jack is a wealthy dater of models with an arsenal of problem-management skills honed over decades of corporate retreats, Liz has only a checking account to her name and clings to a fantasy of presexual, junk-food-munching adolescence. Jack adores the political right for its merciless expedience—he fires Liz's longtime producer, Pete, without a blink—while Liz's liberalism is presented as another symptom of her prolonged adolescence. "Lemon," a stupefied Jack asks later in the season, "what happened in your childhood to make you think that people are good?"

Beyond the comedic possibilities of such an odd couple, what's the show getting at here? In one light, Liz's self-infantilizing might reflect an urge toward equality: The man-child is a venerable comic tradition, from The Jerk to Billy Madison to everything Will Ferrell does, and 30 Rock proves that an eternal 13-year-old tomboy—scared of sex, obsessed with Star Wars and meatball subs—can be just as funny as her male counterpart. It might reflect an ethos of resistance, too: Liz, fearing that she's a brunette caught in a blonde's game, incapable of (and feeling icky about) using her sexuality to get ahead the way her friend Jenna Maroney does, tries to drop out of the race altogether, to barricade herself in a world where wheels of cheese, not sex, wealth, and power, are the brass rings.

But Liz's would-be adolescent paradise—and, with it, her liberal-feminist instincts—is ultimately cast as a neurosis she needs to escape, lest she die alone and unloved in her apartment, choking on a sandwich. This message is nowhere more striking than in the episode in which Liz hires an idol of her youth, the '70s comedy writer Rosemary Howard (Carrie Fisher). Rosemary ha30 Rock will have its Season 3 finale next week, and, barring an unforeseen plummet in... more