by Gibson Grimm, Fall 2021

The Set-Up

When 30 Rock first aired in 2006, it faced the challenge no series about a sketch comedy show wanted to face: another series about a sketch comedy show, premiering on the same network. The former a comedy, and the latter, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006-2007), a drama, at least one seemed destined to fail – but why did 30 Rock, the show with consistently lower ratings (its first season peak still being lower than Studio 60’s valley), get renewed, while its competitor did not?[footnote]Erik Voss, “The Day Comedy Won: How 30 Rock Beat Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” Vulture, December 17, 2010, https://www.vulture.com/2010/12/the-day-comedy-won-a-look-back-at-studio-60-on-the-sunset-strip.html.[/footnote]

While it’s easy enough to assume that viewers just preferred a comedy to a drama, the story appears to be more complicated than that. 30 Rock was created by Saturday Night Live (1975-) head writer and cast member Tina Fey, inspired by her experiences working on the long-running sketch program. Though her original pitch was to write a show in which she would play a producer on a Bill O’Reilly-style cable news program, NBC Vice President Kevin Reilly passed on the idea – instead suggesting she write a show about backstage life at SNL.[footnote]Brian Hiatt, “The Last Days of 30 Rock,” Rolling Stone, January 31, 2013, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/the-last-days-of-30-rock-63797/.[/footnote] Fey did exactly that and, considering her experience in sketch comedy, the show was significantly shaped by the genre it was representing (and frequently parodying), which let it be smarter and—while this might be strange to say about a show as unsubtle as 30 Rock—more nuanced than Studio 60 ever could be. 

Sitcom as Sketch

If asked what the genre of 30 Rock is, any network executive, Wikipedia page, or television viewer pulled from the street would probably answer “sitcom”—and I would be hard pressed to argue against that. The show is episodic, with some multi-episode or cross-season arcs, deriving humor from the situations a consistent group of characters finds themselves in. And though it eschews some traditional sitcom conventions like the laugh track and the multi-camera set-up, so did Arrested Development (2003-2019), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-), and The Office (2005-2013), to name just a few preceding single-camera comedies. So what set 30 Rock apart enough to build a devoted fan base that kept it on the air for seasons despite overall underwhelming ratings? The answer may lie in what the show borrows from sketch comedy itself.

Matt Besser, one of the founding members of the improv/sketch troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, lays out a number of vocabulary terms for writing sketches. Of these, perhaps the three most foundational aspects required of a sketch are: a game, a comic/clown character (in contrast to the “straight man”), and a button.[footnote]Matt Besser, “Sketch Writing Vocabulary List,” Upright Citizens Brigade Training Center, n.d.[/footnote] For example, take the much-beloved SNL sketch “Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker.” The game of the sketch is that this motivational speaker brought in by a couple to set their kids straight is not the charmingly effective motivational speaker we would expect him to be, but rather clumsy, aggressive, and downright weird. The clown character in the game, as you might figure, is Foley himself, sweating profusely and constantly pulling up his pants as he screams that the kids will not “amount to jack squat.” This performance is further highlighted by the differentiation between him and the “straight” characters – the parents and their two children, who are just as shocked as the audience at Foley’s behavior. This game develops, laden with increasingly strange jokes and a hilarious performance by Chris Farley as Matt Foley, until the sketch ends with a button: the most heightened beat of the sketch that serves as a final inversion or punchline to the game. After Foley decides he’s tired of “living in a van down by the river” and is going to move in with the family, the very people that brought him in are forced to lock their doors to protect themselves from this motivational speaker – and that’s the button.

While sketch comedy can take a lot of different forms, these basic elements underlie most sketches produced, particularly on SNL. And a key feature of 30 Rock is the production of the sketch show-within-the-show: TGS with Tracy Jordan (played by the similarly named Tracy Morgan). Much screen time is devoted to the production and airing of a number of sketches which follow the basic principles of an SNL sketch, although satirized to an extent where it is clear the premises are lazy and the jokes not funny (take “Farting Robot,” for instance). A complete list of the fictional TGS sketches depicted onstage or pitched in the writer’s room can be found in this Vulture article, and the breadth of the list makes clear how central these are to the narratives of 30 Rock.[footnote]Bryan Hood and Adam K. Raymond, “From ‘Gaybraham Lincoln’ to ‘Barack A-Llama’: An Updated List of Every TGS Sketch or Pitch on 30 Rock,” January 13, 2013, https://www.vulture.com/2013/01/gaybraham-lincoln-barack-a-llama-a-list-of-every-tgs-sketch-or-pitch-on-30-rock.html.[/footnote]

Of course, satirizing sketches in a sitcom is not enough to label the sitcom a sketch show. But a closer look at the structure of 30 Rock suggests there might be a game, a clown, and a button to the series as a whole. The game, distinguishing this premise from any other show, is a very heavy reliance on intertextuality and meta-referentiality. The show constantly references other media, current (and historical) events, and pop culture in a way that at least some knowledge outside the vacuum of protagonist Liz Lemon’s story is central to understanding the jokes. It heavily satirizes the network on which it airs, and is in ongoing conversation with Saturday Night Live, from the sketches themselves to the behind-the-scenes production of them. If you don’t get the game, you don’t get the show. And while there are clowns aplenty, the main one certainly seems to be Lemon, a fictionalized, exaggerated version of show creator Tina Fey. And, as with any good sketch, I’ll wait to reveal the button until the end.

At this point, one might (fairly) point out: isn’t there a game to a show like Seinfeld? Couldn’t any sitcom character be considered a clown? Certainly. But the game/clown structure of 30 Rock is so intrinsically tied to SNL that it becomes difficult to imagine the sitcom without those foundations—which is perhaps why it succeeded over Studio 60. And beyond the most basic form, there are many conventions of sketch comedy that make their way into 30 Rock as formal elements of genre. Actors on the show tend to play characters that are exaggerated but similar versions of who we imagine those people to be in real life (Lemon/Fey and Jordan/Morgan are two key examples), just as many clown roles in sketch are written for specific actors, often by those actors themselves. The characters and plots are more absurd than what many sitcoms would allow, but would not be out of place on a sketch show—take Dr. Leo Spaceman, for instance, the “doctor” who prescribes random pills to patients and has no idea where the heart can be found. There are many guest stars (not an insignificant number of whom worked with Fey on SNL), and some actors play different roles over the run of the series; Rachel Dratch is the best example of this, playing at least five roles over the course of seven seasons.[footnote]Katrin Horn, “30 Rock: Complexity, Metareferentiality and the Contemporary Quality Sitcom,” in Amerikanische Fernsehserien Der Gegenwart, edited by Christoph Ernst and Heike Paul, 153–84, transcript Verlag, 2015, https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839419892-006.[/footnote] The volume and rapidity with which the jokes come is significant, with a savvy viewer counting 9.57 jokes/minute in one 2010 episode, an impressive number which is more in-line with short sketches than with 30-minute sitcoms.[footnote]Hiatt, “The Last Days of 30 Rock.”[/footnote] Perhaps it should come as no surprise that longtime SNL producer Lorne Michaels also produced this show for its entire run.

The list of genre elements goes on, and it becomes increasingly clear that 30 Rock borrows just as much from the conventions of sketch as it does from the conventions of sitcom. But beyond these specific features prevalent throughout episodes, the series as a whole is structured like a sketch, with a game (and a clown character to develop it) that if you don’t get, you probably won’t find the show as engaging.

The Game: Intertextuality

The foundational element that makes a sketch more than a scene is that there is a game to it – something unusual that sets it apart from reality. In the case of 30 Rock, the core “game” differentiating it from other sitcoms is a heavy reliance on intertextuality and meta-referentiality: constant references to other media texts, and to itself.

Let’s look at a case study of the importance of meta-referentiality to an episode of 30 Rock. One season arc involves the sale of NBC from the Sheinhardt Wig Company (a subsidiary of G.E.) to Kabletown, which is a significant plotline of the season four episode “Future Husband.” The premise of the sale exists in a limbo of half-reality/half-fiction: in truth, NBC (which was a subsidiary of GE) was being sold to a Philadelphia-based cable company. But this company was Comcast, not the fictional Kabletown, and there is no such thing as the Sheinhardt Wig Company. In the episode, Jack Donaghy, a fictional character, seeks answers from fictional GE CEO Don Geiss, but discovers from the actual former chairman of GE, Jack Welch (who plays himself in the episode), that Geiss is dead. The lines between truth and fact blur in the satirization of the actual NBC takeover, trusting that the audience will be able to tell the difference (or just not caring if they don’t). The episode pokes fun at the corporate merger with traditional sitcom jokes (such as it being near-blasphemous that a company from Philadelphia is overtaking one from New York), but also with in-jokes about current events pertaining to the actual company producing this show. In 2009, the Huffington Post ran an article in which Comcast denied rumors of an NBC takeover (despite it actually being underway), and this March 2010 episode of 30 Rock involves Jack Donaghy consistently denying a deal that is very obviously going to happen.[footnote]Danny Shea, “Comcast Buying NBC Universal? Comcast Calls Report ‘Inaccurate,’ May Be In Talks For NBCU Stake,” HuffPost, November 30, 2009, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/comcast-in-talks-to-buy-n_n_305688.[/footnote] 30 Rock sits on a foundation of more than just back-to-back jokes, and is heavily reliant on meta-referentiality to ground the plot (after all, it is a show on NBC about a show on NBC).

It even draws attention to the fact that it is a TV show itself, with writers and actors very similar to the workings of the fictional sketch show-within-the-show, TGS. In this same episode, there is a moment where Liz Lemon asks to talk to one of the writers, because “he still hasn’t rewritten the Olympics sketch about…” We then see Lemon start to mouth “blah blah blah” as a bad voiceover says “Lindsay Vonn, who won the gold medal for skiing.” Not only did this fictional sketch need to be rewritten, but the sentence itself needed to be rewritten and added in later into the 30 Rock episode, likely because the Olympics had not yet taken place at the time of filming. Clearly, the show is comfortable shattering the illusion of the narrative and drawing attention to the fact that it is a television program itself.

But the show extends beyond simply self-reference, and is heavily reliant on its audience’s intertextual understanding of popular culture. In the fourth episode of the second season, Liz Lemon meets her idol: Rosemary Howard, a pioneering female TV writer of the 60s and 70s, played by Carrie Fisher. This fictional writer is past her prime, and when Lemon suggests she come on board as a guest writer for TGS, Rosemary has some questionable ideas for the show – such as a sketch about an abortion clinic, and bringing “the last taboo” of race onstage by having a character don blackface. It’s worth mentioning that the latter is something that 30 Rock several times tried, with Jane Krakowski’s Jenna Maroney and Jon Hamm wearing blackface for ironic effect—and which, in recent years, has come under fire for being racist and offensive particularly to Black viewers and workers on-set, despite its supposedly humorous intentions. The episode is a classic example of the old saying “never meet your heroes,” as Liz loses her job and nearly ends up trapped in a life identical to Rosemary’s, before once again choosing her career above all else and returning to NBC.

The episode, aptly titled “Rosemary’s Baby,” (clever wordplay for any audience member able to catch the reference to the classic horror film) plays with the importance of influence through intertextual references. Principally, the show up to this point has made clear Liz’s fondness for the Star Wars franchise; in one episode she noted it had been her Halloween costume for the previous four years. To have Carrie Fisher, who is best known for playing Princess Leia in the original trilogy, play Liz’s idol, reads as a nod to Liz’s clear obsession with the sci-fi series. And while it is obvious that within the storyworld, Rosemary Howard bears no relation to the Star Wars series, the show embraces the casting by having Rosemary’s final line be “Help me, Liz Lemon! You’re my only Hope!”, a reference to Leia’s famous line in A New Hope when she says the same to Obi-Wan Kenobi. There is also a layer of intertextuality as it pertains to sketch itself, as when Liz notes that Rosemary was the first female writer on Laugh-In, to which there follows a clip parodying the original Rowan and Martin show. Laugh-In, a sketch show that aired on NBC in the late 1960s and early 1970s, helped shape what Saturday Night Live would become when it aired in 1975—its sketches satirized political and cultural events, sometimes featured celebrity appearances, normalized a level of experimental humor rare to TV at the time, and it gave SNL creator Lorne Michaels his breakthrough writing gig.[footnote]Marc Freeman, “Laugh-In at 50: How the Comedy Helped Elect Nixon and Set the Stage for SNL,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 22, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/laugh-at-50-how-comedy-helped-elect-nixon-set-stage-snl-1074575/.[/footnote] And Saturday Night Live, in turn, forms the inspiration for the parody show TGS within 30 Rock. The parody of Laugh-In pays homage to (by poking fun at) an influence of Fey’s show, though (much like the Kabletown takeover of NBC) the jokes require some knowledge of popular culture to get. This game is certainly not for everyone, and actor Jack McBrayer, who plays Kenneth on the show, makes note of that: “hardly anybody in Georgia watches it. It’s a very specific taste. My family doesn’t get it. They don’t watch SNL. There are no references for them to grab onto. There’s not a lot I can do to be like, ‘OK, here are these crazy references we’re making,’ because some of them I don’t get!”[footnote]Quoted in Hiatt, “The Last Days of 30 Rock.”[/footnote]

Another development of this “game” of meta-referentiality and intertextuality is the use of the cutaway. This narrative device, in which a continuous scene is interrupted by the inclusion of other (typically related) footage, is used frequently in 30 Rock for the sake of comedy. Within the episode “Rosemary’s Baby,” there are countless examples. At the start, Liz Lemon has won an award for GE “Follow-ship.” When she asks if it was “because of that GE sketch,” the show cuts to footage of Tracy and Jenna performing a sketch about a man with a microwave for a head, with Jenna exclaiming “but it’s such an excellent GE microwave!” before cutting back to the TGS writing room where Liz is receiving her award. Later, when Liz is in line to meet her idol at the book signing, Liz tells TGS producer Pete that she “grew up idolizing her comedy,” before the show cuts to footage of a mock-Laugh In show, where a Nixon lookalike is bumping into people proclaiming “pardon me,” and a young Liz Lemon states in deadpan that “it’s funny ‘cause it’s true.” These cutaways create humor by heightening a joke, as the terrible product-placement microwave sketch shows just how much of a “follower” Liz has become, and also just how terrible TGS must be in general. The cutaway to young Liz watching TV suggests that Liz’s comedy idol is not particularly funny (or her comedy is of a very specific time), and that young Liz was dorky.

The cutaway can be used to undermine a claim a character makes (such as with Liz claiming that Rosemary is a comedy icon), or to visually express to the audience the absurdity of the storyworld (as with the atrocious GE microwave sketch that aired on TGS). Because sketch comedy tends to take place in one location for the sake of staging, the use of the cutaway may appear in opposition to viewing 30 Rock through the lens of sketch. But there is another important term in sketch writing – heightening – which is the “process of making sure that each of your beats has higher impact and is naturally funnier than the preceding one.”[footnote]Besser, “Sketch Writing.”[/footnote] 30 Rock makes use of the advantages of television in heightening its jokes to the extreme by actually showing the absurdity of its jokes. Onstage, one can only reference a sketch about a man with a GE microwave for a head. Onscreen, we can see it and hear dialogue surrounding it. In doing this, 30 Rock adapts sketch writing techniques to the medium of a single-camera sitcom, which sets it apart from its peer programs.

These are the elements that Studio 60 was lacking. Many attempts at intertextual references to pop culture felt out-of-date (what was supposed to be a masterful sketch in one episode was a parody of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera), and it was missing the knowledge of what an SNL-style show is really like off-camera. Though Aaron Sorkin, the creator of Studio 60, did request to shadow a week of SNL production, Lorne Michaels refused, and Sorkin’s knowledge of how to write a tight TV drama script was not enough to carry him in satirizing sketch comedy.[footnote]Voss, “The Day Comedy Won.”[/footnote] It’s hard enough to be funny, but to poke fun at something that is already funny is much harder, and that’s where the sketch backgrounds of 30 Rock’s creators come in handy.

The Comic: Liz Lemon

The game of the sketch is only as funny as the characters make it, which is why some form of comic character is crucial to the success of the sketch. While one could point to any number of 30 Rock “authors” whose experience in New York comedy helped shape the show—SNL/30 Rock producer Lorne Michaels, writers like Paula Pell who worked on both shows, and numerous sketch comedy actors—it would seem silly not to view Tina Fey as the “God” figure of this program. Fey created a character that is an amalgamation of her own background, experiences working as an improv comedian, and most importantly hitting her stride in the writer’s room of Saturday Night Live, which has allowed for a fictional showrunner who can build on the game of intertextuality and meta-referentiality, because the clown is a part of the game itself.

In revisiting the episode “Rosemary’s Baby,” the decision to have Carrie Fisher play Liz Lemon’s idol is more than just a humorous nod to Star Wars. Tina Fey herself has made it known that she is a fan of the iconic character, writing upon Fisher’s death that “Carrie Fisher meant a lot to me. Like many women my age, Princess Leia occupies about sixty percent of my brain at any given time.”[footnote]Quoted in Matt Vella, “Tina Fey Remembers Carrie Fisher: ‘I Feel So Lucky That I Got to Meet Her,'” Time, December 27, 2016, https://time.com/4618491/carrie-fisher-dead-tina-fey/.[/footnote] By having Fisher play Liz Lemon’s idol on the show, Fey very well seemed to host one of her idols on set, emphasizing the autobiographical nature of Liz Lemon’s character. It begins to get confusing to think about: Liz Lemon’s idol is played by the actor famous for playing one of Liz Lemon’s favorite characters, though Liz does not recognize her to be the latter. But the audience understands the cultural significance of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, which holds its own importance to them and to the show’s creator. The lines truly begin to blur between Liz Lemon and Tina Fey as we see their influences tied up in this way. Fey has even said she “wouldn’t want [Lemon] to do anything I wouldn’t do,” and that when the writers tried to make Lemon out to be a fan of the Harry Potter series, Fey was quick to correct: “Guys, I stop at Star Wars.”[footnote]Hiatt, “The Last Days of 30 Rock.”[/footnote]

Additionally, by casting someone like Carrie Fisher who carries years of celebrity baggage that an audience might be familiar with, Fey is able to use this paratextual information to her advantage to make a statement. While Fisher did have an acting and writing career following the original Star Wars trilogy, she is by far most known for playing Princess Leia. And while Leia in many regards can be considered a strong female character who takes control (following Fisher’s 2016 death and in the wake of that year’s Presidential election, her icon became associated with the “Resistance” movement and the Women’s March), she is also associated with being an object of desire.[footnote]Megen de Bruin-Molé, “Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses: Star Wars and Popular Feminism,” in Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, ed. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 225–40.[/footnote] A famous example of this might be the gold bikini slave costume she wears in Return of the Jedi, which was culturally relevant enough to merit becoming a sexual fantasy of Ross Geller in the TV show Friends. In this way, Carrie Fisher is a good example of an actress who received attention for being attractive when young, but lost much of that as she aged. The 30 Rock episode shows Fisher’s character living in a dump in “Little Chechnya,” with Emmys and WGA awards scattered amongst trash. Rosemary, who was once one of the greatest writers on television, is now drinking wine out of a thermos and pitching a screenplay about 50-year-old women joining the army to sleep with 18-year-old men. But, as relayed by Liz Lemon, Rosemary had a good explanation for this: “women become obsolete in this business when there’s no one left that wants to see them naked.”

The decision to cast an actress in this role who experienced this grim Hollywood reality, even if not to the extent of Rosemary, drives home the point even further: it’s hard to be a woman in entertainment, which is something Tina Fey knew well. When she became SNL’s first female head writer in 1999, she had to work to usher in a new era away from the “frat house hoo-ha” of the 90’s show culture which, according to brief cast member Janeane Garofolo, was full of “using the words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ in a sketch.”[footnote]Virginia Heffernan, “Anchor Woman,” The New Yorker, October 26, 2003, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/11/03/anchor-woman.[/footnote] Fey also became the first truly female comic face of the show, paving the way for fellow actors such as Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch to compete against the male actors for screen time. Fey won several awards and ushered in what Garofolo called “the Tina Fey regime,” but by 2003 was still one of only three female writers in a room of 20. In her memoir Bossypants, she includes the quote “Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.”[footnote]Quoted in Mike Roe, “We Still Love 30 Rock, but Its Foundation Is Shaky,” Vanity Fair, December 2, 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/12/30-rock-tina-fey-race-blackface.[/footnote]

Fey was not only able to break-through an incredibly male-dominated industry and do well for herself, but she was able to use that power to boost her fellow writers and cast members to become one of the most respected people on the SNL set – “if she’s laughing, everyone’s laughing,” once said cast member Jimmy Fallon.[footnote]Quoted in Heffernan, “Anchor Woman.”[/footnote] But for Fey, becoming a woman in comedy does not mean avoiding jokes about women. Her approach is that comedy needs to make fun of all people, and if her sketches and show didn’t make fun of women, there would be no funny roles for women to play. It certainly helps that it’s a woman making jokes about women, and not the male-against-female jokes that played out in the 1990s, but Fey has become very successful at this beyond Saturday Night Live, constantly lampooning female characters on 30 Rock, particularly in the character of Liz Lemon (which essentially becomes a parody of herself). Though Rosemary is certainly the butt of the joke in this episode, her failed life takes on new meaning when you realize Tina Fey has also won Emmy and WGA awards and, if this is the future for a woman in television, then this is the future for both Lemon and Fey. 

Other self-effacing jokes are more lighthearted. The episode “Future Husband,” for example, begins with a recounting of the embarrassing things Lemon did while under anesthesia from oral surgery, including putting a waffle in the DVD player and watching it, and ordering many a home massage off of Craigslist. Later, when she meets the mystery man she hit it off with while at the dentist, the date goes so poorly that “the waitress gave [them] separate checks without asking” and “a priest came over and asked who [they]’d lost.” Many of the series’ multi-episode arcs follow Lemon’s relationship woes like this one, which is comedy rooted in Fey’s own lived experiences as a high-schooler and college kid who didn’t pursue the stereotypical path of dating and partying, instead focusing on theatre or writing a humor column for her high school newspaper.[footnote]Heffernan, “Anchor Woman.”[/footnote] She was also a self-proclaimed “mean girl” which, if not apparent enough from her writing of the 2004 film Mean Girls, is evident in the season three 30 Rock episode “Reunion,” where Liz Lemon dreads re-encountering all her high school bullies at the class reunion, only to realize she was the bully all along. The jokes and plotlines of 30 Rock are frequently satirizing Fey’s life, both in areas the audience may or may not be familiar with, and this creates the ultimate female clown character for 30 Rock: one who the show’s author knows well, who is steeped in the game of intertextuality and meta-referentiality and, perhaps most importantly, is incredibly funny (in large part due to the preceding factors).

Studio 60 had none of this. That may be a little unfair to say, considering it wasn’t trying to be a fast-paced sitcom, so perhaps it didn’t need a “clown” in the traditional sense. But what it did need was a strong character rooted in intricate knowledge of sketch comedy, which it did not have. Aaron Sorkin, as the esteemed creator of The West Wing, certainly knew how to write witty political drama, but he was out of his element in creating characters that would know how to turn around a sketch program. And not that actors can’t play many different roles, but the casting of Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry as the new showrunners brings a humor more rooted in dry wit and sarcasm than anything else, which perhaps isn’t the energy that should be on the set of a sketch comedy show. At least, it wasn’t the on-set energy of SNL that 30 Rock was able to successfully embrace.

The Button

So, if 30 Rock is a sketch with a game of intertextuality/meta-referentiality and a clown character of Fey-as-Lemon, then how does this sketch end? After an impressive seven seasons, is how. And the joke, as cruel as it may be, is that Studio 60 ended after its first, despite higher ratings than Fey’s show for the entire run of its season. Certainly, this is in part due to the fact that the ratings consistently declined over its run, but also due to waning critical reception after its well-received Network-homage pilot episode. Halfway through the season, the plot largely centered to focus on the romantic tension between Matthew Perry and Amanda Peet’s characters, a shift away from the type of show that the pilot promised.[footnote]Benji Wilson, “Witty, Bold … and Axed,” The Observer, July 22, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/jul/22/broadcasting.observerreview.[/footnote] And critics began to pick up on a certain self-congratulatory arrogance plaguing the show’s approach to its subject, with Aaron Sorkin writing every episode despite his unfamiliarity with the actual dynamics of a sketch show set.[footnote]Nathan Rabin, “Case File #1: Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip,” The A.V. Club, October 26, 2011, https://www.avclub.com/case-file-1-studio-60-on-the-sunset-strip-1798228131.[/footnote] And whenever a masterfully genius sketch is supposedly written by the fictional showrunners at Studio 60—like the aforementioned Gilbert and Sullivan parody—not only was it out of touch, but it was simply unfunny, which is arguably the only thing a sketch needs to be.[footnote]Voss, “The Day Comedy Won.”[/footnote] 

By no means was Studio 60 the worst show to ever air on television, but it is interesting to look at its missteps compared to everything that 30 Rock did right. On paper, 30 Rock should not have done as well as it did—whether that’s looking at the ratings it put up during its premiere season, or the absurdist and unconventional nature of its jokes and storylines. Tina Fey even said of the fall 2006 season that “it’s just bad luck for me that in my first attempt at primetime I’m going up against the most powerful writer in television.”[footnote]Quoted in Voss, “The Day Comedy Won.”[/footnote] What she didn’t account for, however, was that she had the upper hand in terms of experience. Sketch comedy’s trademark appeal is that it is funny and, whether or not it was always trying to be a comedy (though I think it very frequently was), Studio 60 simply never hit that note, neither in the tone of the series nor in the fictional show-within-the-show. 30 Rock had the advantage of its form as a sitcom, a TV genre designed for comedy, but it took it to the next level. Not only was it current on abandoning the aging sitcom tropes like the laugh track and multi-camera set-up, but it borrowed so heavily from the trademarks of sketch comedy that the show practically became a sketch itself. TGS, as the show-within-the-show, is hilariously bad in the best of ways. And, in its presentation of TGS, 30 Rock is masterful at walking the line between being wackily absurdist and very, very smart—a line that the best sketches straddle. The game of intertextuality and meta-referentiality felt fresh to the savvy TV viewer, and Liz Lemon is the perfect clown character because she is essentially a hyperbolized version of the reality of backstage SNL. Put simply, Tina Fey was able to use her experience in being funny to create funny backstage narratives and jokes about an absurdly funny fictional sketch show—that’s a lot of layers of funny and, at the end of the day, that’s why 30 Rock works so well.

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