Living In Our 30 Rock World
Lemon, it's 2026
It was almost too perfect switching on the Knicks game and seeing Timothée Chalamet sitting courtside with his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, on one side, and Tina Fey on the other. Next to Fey sat Tracy Morgan, which is right up there alongside Larry David and Susie Essman taking in games together for me. The whole thing felt very Liz Lemon and Tracy Jordan from 30 Rock having the two of them sitting next to Timmy and Kylie a few weeks after Chalamet’s loss at the Oscars and his comments about how nobody cares about opera or ballet anymore. The jokes basically wrote themselves, even though my first instinct was that Fey had already written better ones in her head, but it didn’t feel like that big of a deal…until I saw the news the next day that people were mad at Timothée for “manspreading,” and getting into Fey’s legspace. Even though we’re dealing with a war, there was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that’s being treated as an assassination attempts, and whatever crazy thing that happened in the five minutes it took me to type all of this, Timmy sitting like a careless teen boy on a subway train was the big news story of the morning.
All you need to make it a 30 Rock bit is for whoever Fey deals with at Netflix to give her a call and tell her she needs to make a public statement that she wasn’t mad at Timothée, and that he and Kylie are lovely people. The reason has nothing to do with business, but because the Netflix bigwig is worried the negative press will come back to haunt him, and he won’t get invited to the party celebrating Kris Jenner’s next facelift. A Jenner/Kardashian new face unveiling is the event of the season, Tina!
I was honestly happy for the little distraction. It felt so minimal, and nobody got hurt from Timbo stretching his legs. What got me was how it was just a few people—sorry, “critics” is what we call random people on the Internet now—just found something, anything to get mad at, but it wasn’t aimed at Fey like it almost always was 10 or 15 years ago when 30 Rock was on, and her book, Bossypants, was a massive hit. Sure, I recall a couple of thing she said giving me pause back then, but people were usually angry at Fey’s character and creation, and not Fey herself. We talk a lot these days about how media illiterate, intellectually lazy, and unfunny we’ve collectively become as a culture, but it’s often framed as something strictly of, and maybe even because of the Trump presidency. Like the downhill slide started on November 8th, 2016, and not a day before that. In fact, it had been in progress for years, but the discourse around Fey and her show seems like a canary in the coal mine now. People kept asking if the show was racist, like 30 Rock was a person who spent their free time going to Klan meetings and posting about how much they hate immigrants online. It had characters appear in blackface a few times, and people accused Morgan’s Tracy Jordan of being a racist stereotype—usually leaving out the fact that the show was a comedy, and almost everything about it was meant to satirize the characters and tropes it featured. A show, like any piece of art, can be a lot of things, and jokes can often be insensitive, fall flat, or just plain unfunny, but a show isn’t a person that’s capable of hating another group of people. Now, with racism actually making a comeback, it feels like throwing around the word “racist” to describe almost everything that people maybe found dumb or distasteful only watered down the impact of the term. To borrow a phrase from Liz Lemon, if only we would have seen how dumb things were getting and figured out a way to “shut it down” then.
But we didn’t, and now we’re here, stuck in what feels like a never ending season of 30 Rock, where the news is always gloomy, the entertainment “slop” is dumber than ever, and rich guys always win. Everything is dumb, and a lot of us find ourselves feeling more like Liz Lemon than ever: overworked, way too overconfident in our beliefs, and trying to find the humor in it all.
People who commented on articles and post to social media maybe had problems with the show, but actual critics loved 30 Rock. It was beloved while it was on, but it suffered from lukewarm-enough viewership that there was always that worry that it might not return for another season. It did end up going for seven seasons, and the show ended with a proper finale that some other wonderful shows didn’t get to have. Looking back, I didn’t have much doubt that it was going to end up being viewed as one of the all-time great comedies, especially for the way it delivered more perfect jokes one after another in a single episode than most shows can muster throughout an entire run. Each cast member was capable of stealing the screen, whether it was Fey, Morgan, Jane Krakowski, Jack McBrayer, Alec Baldwin, or even Scott Adsit as the perfectly bald and broken producer, Pete. Chris Parnell as Dr. Spaceman, Sherri Shepherd as Tracy’s wife, and Elaine Stritch as Colleen Donaghy were all perfect. They even had Buck Henry as Liz’s dad, making it the perfect blend of satire and homage to 20th century American comedy and television.
It’s one of my favorite shows ever, but even I didn’t call it ending up the template for this stupid era. Today, 30 Rock sits somewhere between how we find out the hard way that authors of dystopian fiction were actually trying to warn us that the things they wrote about could end up happening if we weren’t careful, and the realization in the aughts that The Simpsons “called” so much. 30 Rock was making fun of the state of television when it made jokes about how NBC had premiered an action drama called “Bitch Hunter,” and that the network had a hit on its hands with a reality show called “MILF Island.” Those kinds of shows being on TV around 2010 wasn’t too farfetched of an idea, but now that many of us get our NBC shows from one of the 10,000 streaming networks available, and a lot of those services fill the need for “content” with the most lowbrow trash and A.I. slop imaginable, “Bitch Hunter” actually sounds great.
We came to understand that Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, Liz Lemon’s boss who was supposed to represent the peak of masculinity, wealth, and corporate greed, was a decent guy deep down. Just a blue collar kid who worked his way up from some sad existence in Boston who clawed his way to the top. Jack was a parody of Bush era rich white guys, and those men were terrible in their own ways—but now look at the sort of rich and powerful white guys we’ve got. I dial up any episode of 30 Rock and I can’t help but long for Jack Donaghy with his perfect hair to show up and give Jeff Bezos a wedgie for being such an insufferable dork.
When it came to politics, the “Brooklyn Without Limits” episode from the fifth season could easily be rewritten with a few minor changes and be about 2026, with John Slattery playing a New England politician with no education, a checkered past, and really bleak views gaining momentum in the race he’s in. Slattery’s Steven Austin (“And if you’re blind, I am the wrestler,” he says in a commercial) feels too much like the sort of “real” guy either party would run because they think he’d win over “real” voters in 2026, but it’s the other part of the episode that’s just as brilliant, with Liz feeling good about herself after she buys a pair of jeans from the company the episode gets its name from. Liz gets on her white lady high horse about something, then tells Jack that the pants come from one of the companies “saving the world” because they talk up some sort of green initiatives and have some fictional origin story. Jack, however, knows the truth of who owns Brooklyn Without Limits: “Halliburton. In the mid-’90s, they found themselves with a surplus of canvas waterboarding hoods, so they had sweatshops make them into messenger bags to sell to outer-borough idiots.” And to make it better, when Liz says she doesn’t believe him, that the liberal media wouldn’t lie to her, Jack has another reveal: “No such thing. The New York Times is owned by NYT Incorporated, which is owned by Altheon Ballistic Dynamics, which is owned by the Murdoch family, who are owned...by Haliburton.”
30 Rock was actually the most subversive show of it’s time, but people were too busy tweeting about how it was bad because one of its fictional characters had views or said something they didn’t agree with. It’s very of its time, but hardly feels like a relic that can only be appreciated if you lived through the years it was on. It’s not The Office, which is still way more popular even though it had just as many jokes about insensitive, clueless white people. The appeal of that show, according to many of its younger viewers who discovered it when the show made its debut on streaming services, is it feels nostalgic. It’s slow, and has plenty of funny moments, but most of them involve Steve Carrell’s character who isn’t even involved in the last two seasons, or Dwight talking about his family. It’s a fine, funny show, but 30 Rock, which was on the same network for nearly the same exact period is one of the greats that feels more relevant all the time. Go back and give it a rewatch, and by the fourth episode from 2006, you’ll see what I mean. At the start of “Jack the Writer” the TGS writing staff is going over the sketches for the upcoming episode and realizes something has changed in the news cycle and, “We gotta change this Trump joke.”