Grand Finale: 30 Rock’s triumphant last hurrah.
HOGCOCK!/LAST LUNCH (SEASON SEVEN, EPISODES 12 AND 13)
NO WEDDINGS, NO funerals, no births, no work promotions and no surprise reunions. In its finale, 30 Rock characteristically twisted free of convention. Season 7 of the NBC sitcom checked character milestones as it went, clearing the way for an ending unencumbered by a sense of occasion. As always with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s smart-dumb comedy set behind the scenes at a Saturday Night Live-style sketch show, the gags came first.
By its end, 30 Rock’s showwithin-a-show, ‘TGS’, had been cancelled, Liz Lemon (Fey) was married with adopted twins, Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) had wed her own female impersonator, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) had buried his mother and landed his dream job, and Jack Mcbrayer’s Kenneth
Ellen Parcell (flesh vessel for an immortal being whose name, if you heard it, would make you lose your mind) had graduated from NBC page to network president. As such, the two-part finale directed by Beth Mccarthy-miller didn’t need to be anything but another dose of 30 Rock.
Written by Carlock and Jack Burditt, ‘Hogcock!’ saw Liz and Jack fall out, each blaming the other for having fundamentally changed their outlook. (Jack had made Liz a workaholic; Liz had shown Jack there was more to life than synergising backward overflow.) In ‘Last Lunch’, written by Fey and Tracey Wigfield, Jack enacted an elaborate suicide fake-out to ensure the pair wouldn’t stay estranged, culminating in a joint declaration of platonic love.
Elsewhere at NBC Studios,
Jenna attempted to pivot her career, Kenneth attempted to unfreeze her Botoxed emotions and make her feel something about ‘TGS’ ending, while Tracy (Tracy Morgan) attempted to derail everything. One-beat cameos from from Ice-t, Nancy Pelosi, Salma Hayek and Julianne Moore were whisked in with running jokes, deep call-backs and multiple sub-plots.
Much of the finale concerned supporting players. Pete (Scott Adsit) faked his death, and Lutz (John Lutz) revenge-ordered the staff lunch from sandwich shop Blimpie. Emotion was allowed to creep in around the edges of Liz’s moving goodbye scene with Tracy, and the heft of Liz and Jack’s odd-couple friendship was saluted with a lengthy speech about bear meat, but overall, ballsily few allowances were made for the fact that this was the end.
Never over-earnest or forgetting that it was here to poke fun, even Jenna’s final song was a cavalcade of call-back nonsense that ended an Emmy award-winning, seven-year, 138-episode run on the word “flurm”.
If 30 Rock had been less dogged in its pursuit of every gag, it might have won a broader audience, but wouldn’t be so beloved today for doing business on its own terms. In the meta words of Tracy wrapping up the last episode of ‘TGS’, “Thanks America, that’s our show. Not a lot of people watched it, but the joke’s on you, ’cause we got paid anyway.” Shut it down. Lemon out.