This blog was supposed to be about 30 Rock trivia. I am sorry. I can’t keep my mouth shut anymore.
What has happened to you, 30 Rock? You’re like that best friend in middle school who, as soon as we got to high school, ditched me for the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd. Why?! Were our jokes not cool enough? My clothes not fake-torn enough? Why have you changed? I used to like you, but now you’re like Diet Snapple – just unsatisfying. (That’s right, I said it.)
What has happened to Tracy? His troubles used to be things like people thinking he’s normal, not getting home on time for role-play, getting chased by the Black Crusaders, and having his meat machine spray hot oil on people. Now he’s having marriage problems because his wife is mad at him for going to a strip club. I don’t buy it! Tracy went from living in an ultra-realistic celebrity world to living in boring old reality. If I need reality, I’ll watch CSPAN. But I don’t want reality, I want Tracy to go on Dr. Phil, or to have Dot Com make a time-machine out of 8-tracks. I don’t want to see him with divorce issues. Give me more!
Jack used to have all the answers. He was that character that we knew was always right and, for that, we love to hate him. Now he’s just vulnerable to everything. His heart attack makes him a limping gazelle near a pack of lions. He can’t even keep it together for Jerry Seinfeld. (No disrespect to Jerry but I never got the “intimidating” vibe from him.) Like Tracy, Jack’s problems are now just run-of-the-mill for a TV exec. Someone who’s trying to get the same job as you is doing underhanded things to embarrass you? No…I don’t believe it. And I wouldn’t have minded the whole cookie jar incident, but again it just leads to Jack being vulnerable. The other times when Jack was vulnerable, it led to a story or at least a little bit of interaction between characters. For instance, when Jack couldn’t act, Liz was there to be part of it. Again, when Jack was going through his divorce, Liz and Tracy were there to support the scene. With the cookie jar thing, Kenneth had a 2-min scene with him about it. That’s it. And Steve Buschemi was just sort of weird.
Hey, where’s Rachel Dratch?
Now for Liz. I have a big gripe when Liz loses her tooth. … Yeah I don’t know what happened either. It just drops from her mouth and none of the writers on 30 Rock cared to explore that anymore. From season 1, we know that Dr. Spaceman is a pretty good dentist. Couldn’t he have done something? And when there’s a joke about how Liz hasn’t set up her home office yet, they cut to a clip of her home office still in the boxes. Some advice: you don’t need to cut to another clip if it provides nothing more than we expect. There’s nothing funny about seeing the expected, especially when it’s just boxes.
Liz needs to do some soul searching. Let her go to yoga looking for peace and tranquility, then let her find Jack in spandex. And let the yoga instructor be Rachel Dratch. Then she can go in the self-help aisle and find Dr. Spaceman’s book entitled “Finding Inner Peace With Your Piece” and he can be pictured there with some semi-automatics. Let Liz do the boring and mundane things but then make them go wrong somehow.
I like Jenna. She’s still in her own little world of fame. I’m concerned about Kenneth. I’m worried that he’s going to talk too much and we’ll find out too much about him. Please don’t complicate Kenneth. He’s such a simple boy. I wish the other writers in the show had a part. I miss Toofer, Frank and Josh. Again, where’s Rachel Dratch?
Let us hope that 30 Rock comes back around. Those Abercrombie & Fitch kids don’t care about you. They just need you for profiling purposes.
