Tonight, NBC is officially on notice as the second season of 30 Rock kicks off. I'll forgive you if you didn't watch it last season (but just barely) but now there are no excuses. This is the best sitcom on television, and you should be paying attention.
Emmy voters were. They just awarded 30 Rock the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy, or as I prefer to call it this year, the "Arrested Development Memorial Emmy." This award is apparently give out to the show with the highest value (critical reception) per capita (viewers). Upon accepting the award, show creator Tina Fey (of Saturday Night Live fame) thanked "our dozens and dozens of viewers."
For those of you who aren't familiar, 30 Rock is a quirky, fast-paced re-creation of Fey's SNL days. She stars as Liz Lemon, the head writer and show runner The Girly Show, an NBC sketch comedy. Alec Baldwin co-stars as her ultra-capitalistic boss Jack Donaghy, who determines that the show doesn't have a wide enough audience and promptly hires the unpredictable and presumably crazy movie star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), who's claim to fame is mega-comedy hits such as "Who Dat Ninja?". Liz is forced to deal with the fallout, as well as a motley crew of eccentric staff members.
Like Arrested and other viewer-starved shows before it, 30 Rock isn't your traditional sitcom. The dialogue is sharp, includes frequent cultural references, and comes at you fast and without a laugh track. Frequent cutaways are used, not as sight gags a la Family Guy, but as clever ways to keep you on your toes.
Fey and Morgan are wonderful, but it's Baldwin's breathy, domineering passive agressiveness that steals the show. Baldwin brings the same deadpan delivery to Jack Donaghy that convinced SNL producer Lorne Michaels to give him a standing invitation to host the show whenever he wanted. Here, he is a comedic gem.
Arrested won an Emmy its first season as well, had its episodes cut back in the second, and was finally cancelled by ratings-hungry FOX after the third. NBC has a chance to prove they're not FOX by keeping this show going. They've got a good track record: both Seinfeld and The Office were ratings flops in their first seasons before being salvaged by savvy network execs.
All said and done, 30 Rock is the best show you're not watching. But tonight is your chance: 8:30 on NBC. Perhaps you'll like it so much that, as Tracy Jordan says, you'll want to "take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant."
Or maybe you'll just laugh.
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