Battle of the Network Stars
It’s East Coast 30 Rock against the West Coast heavyweights of Studio 60
Clearly Sorkin thinks (hopes?) the public is just biding its time until someone finally puts Strindberg or the ancient Greeks in prime time, whereas Tina Fey’s 30 Rock would prefer to make jokes about the reality of what does galvanize viewers, as when Krakowski’s live mishap with a scratching cat becomes a funny YouTube phenomenon the next day. But if the cyclical popularity of the real Saturday Night Live’s quality roller coaster is any indication — currently suffering with only the happily loony Amy Poehler as a consistent treasure — the craving isn’t for self-consciously smart, it’s for another Bill Murray or Eddie Murphy or Mike Myers or Will Ferrell. Guys who had killer Zeitgeisty shtick, not pretensions toward importance. (That comes when they leave to make movies.)
Fey gets this. “The Girlie Show” on 30 Rock is obviously no good: A sketch we hear about called “The Overly Confident Morbidly Obese Woman” is merely a gag line, not indicative of the end of civilization. But the idea isn’t to lament bad TV, just to spotlight the ridiculous struggle that goes into getting mediocrity on the air, which for now makes 30 Rock a weirdly appropriate and hilarious symbol of our times rather than Sorkin’s strange world of comedy righteousness, refinement-hungry viewers and intonings on the “importance of pop culture” — as somebody actually said on Studio 60 last week (groan).
In the pilot of 30 Rock, when Alec Baldwin’s poised appliance executive explains with deadpan authority to a bewildered, interference-averse Fey that the reason he’s been transferred to oversee television is because he helped develop a revolutionary oven that uses three kinds of heat to “cook a turkey in 22 minutes,” it’s probably not a coincidence that that’s how long your average network half-hour runs without commercials. Now that’s a joke, clever in its knowingness about corporate synergy, yet utterly silly under Baldwin’s gonzo-confident delivery. Plus, it made me laugh out loud.
30 ROCK | NBC | ?Wednesdays, 8 p.m.
STUDIO 60 | NBC | Mondays, 10 p.m.
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