30 Rock: is the quarantine reunion worth the wait?
As a promotion for the Super Bowl in 2012, NBC higher-ups corralled all of that TV season’s talent for a video rendition of the toe-tapper Brotherhood of Man from Broadway classic How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Notwithstanding the jack-inthe-box horror of the brief shot of an Apprentice-era Donald Trump, selling this massive corporate interest as one big happy family would prove a big pill for America to swallow, and so the producers of this segment wisely turned to the cast of 30 Rock. The sitcom’s characters opened the segment with some sound one-liners about executives hoarding pay, and more importantly, established a crucial tone of selfreferential self-deprecation. The show had never been shy about the incestuous love affair between art and commerce, and so it proved a workable vessel for a commercial that needed to be delivered with a no-BS wink. If we’re going to sell to you, the opening tacitly stated, the least we can do is show a little shame and get some laughs out of it.
It’s in this spirit that the gang gets back together for one last ride, which just so happens to be in the form of an hour-long special pushing the next year of content from the benevolent overlords at NBC Universal. It’s a devilishly apt pairing, the orgy of synergy that is TV upfronts presentation and the unlikely 30 Rock revival – a deeply cynical attempt to milk nostalgia for a show about TV deeply cynical attempts to cash in on our sentimentality. That may seem like a weighty concept to convey in the lacunae between sizzle reels, but by the comfortingly unchanged comic sensibility of these writers, that can come across in an insert shot of Kenneth Parcell’s soul gasping out of his body as he prostrates himself before advertisers.
He’s the chairman of NBC these days, a paradigm shift set up by the series finale back in 2013, though he has not parted with his country habit of eating chickpeas from a can. (Jack McBrayer also portrays his sultry assistant Vivica, easily the show’s most inspired gag.) The new episode, a word justified here by the structure and occasionally even the rhythm of a normal hour of entertainment, gets rapid-fire laughs from checking in on the happily-ever-afters not previously laid out. Hapless beta male Pete Hornberger (Scott Adsit) has reinvented himself as a goth-styled rock star, much to the pleasure of his wife, Paula; incurable eccentric Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) has moved to Canada, where he spends his free time polishing his hockey sticks using maple syrup, as Canadians are wont to do; horndog Frank (Judah Friedlander) was consulting at children’s program Peppa Pig, until he was let go for keeping pornography around the office.
These feel like real set-ups for
real jokes, made under the permissive auspices of a moneyed conglomerate. Some guest appearances had an intrusive incompatibility to them (for the love of all that is holy, must we watch one of the Kardashians toddle her way through scripted comedy?), and the mandate to set up each clip-package segment with a couple lines of dialogue couldn’t avoid the core shill-ness. Still, the TV-history-literate 30 Rock would be the first to remind us that Milton Berle’s first show on NBC had Texaco right in the title. Same as it ever was, except for the group Zooms.
But this show in particular returns with a higher mandate than simply being funny. Topicality was so integral to its DNA that today, every new world happening generates a fresh wave of tweets wondering how 30 Rock would have satirized it. The series has been the subject of some controversy in recent weeks, as Americans remembered en masse that a handful of episodes included blackface, and it would have been comic cowardice to let the issue sit. The writers make an early overture toward simple contrition with one joke re-dubbing “Toofer” (so nicknamed because he’s a twofer hire, as a black man and a Harvard graduate) as James, but the engagement gets even more substantive. We learn that prima donna Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) has been canceled, and that she’s been losing her mind since landing in “famous person jail”.
Though the public turned on Jenna for defecating in a Thermos belonging to Mandy Moore, she must nonetheless sort through the thorny politics of “cancel culture”. She makes the hollow justifications that Fey herself knows not to, rationalizing that “the late 2010s were a different time!” After some duly hilarious wallows in self-pity (quarantine has been hardest on “hot extroverts”, apparently), she arrives at the realization that she can do nothing but own up to the wrongness of what she’s done and throw herself at the public’s mercy. And because this is a sitcom, this also involves her using a musical number about the new streaming service Peacock to force Moore to accept her apology.
A well-calibrated harmony between earnestness and irony powered the engine that made 30 Rock go, and the old bucket still runs like a dream after all these years. Remorse must be tempered by a resolution to remain uncouth, just as a professional agreement to play a little ball must be undercut by subversive sniggering. Even as they grease the giant grinding cogs, the staff can expose the absurdity of corporate doctrine by delivering its soulless messaging with maximum enthusiasm. These writers have known for years how easily promo copy can be made to sound sarcastic, that it takes nothing more than the mere suggestion of a carbon-based organism ever actually using the phrase “dynamic new platform”.
After a while, the ads themselves start to play like cold punchlines, as if each new real show had been conceived as a bit by comedy writers. The lines about such fictitious titles as Dracula PD and Merlin: The Teenage Years sound no more implausible than the sitcom about the boyhood antics of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, which is real. Right? If nothing else, this will be the lasting legacy of 30 Rock. Every time a new season of TV brings us something that seems too dumb to be true – every time that “too dumb to be true” seems like it might be the very essence of the televisual medium, an inkling never stronger than during upfronts season – its genius will grow.