30 rock essays
That being said, the inimitable combination of physical comedy and mordant wit that Tina Fey employs so consistently makes choosing these five episodes excruciatingly difficult. The way Reubens animates the body that the writers have bestowed upon him, a product of centuries of inbreeding, is a tour-de-force performance in itself. Jenna, fancying herself a modern Grace Kelly, sneaks into the party and enjoys a romance with Gerhardt that ends in champagne-related calamity. Jack runs into his glamorous and temperamental ex-wife Isabella Rossellini , who flies into a rage when Liz and Jack pretend to be a happy couple. The visit goes spectacularly awry, as expected. He comes to realize that Liz and the ridiculous entanglements that are almost contractual requisites of their relationship bring him the greatest joy.
30 Rock Landed on Us
He is fifty years old, divorced, and lives alone in an old white farmhouse in the Hamptons and an apartment on Central Park West—feeling thwarted, if not quite persecuted. In conversation, he lets out an occasional yelping laugh, but he is often wistful, in a way that is linked to professional and romantic regrets, and to a period of tabloid notoriety last year, when an angry voice mail that he left for his daughter, who was then eleven, became public.
And, if you were capable of enjoying it, it would be even better. The production did not have the funds to produce Hollywood bustle: the loudest sounds were birdsong and a distant wood-chipper. He said that he had been falling asleep at night with a laptop on his chest.
When he had finished, he asked about other messages. She told him. Baldwin can be quite earnest, even as he keeps an ironic eye on his earnestness. To play the role that is the fizz in the drink, you know what I mean? You are the movie! I wish I could play the lead role in one movie, one great movie.
He was called to work, and rather stiffly walked a few paces into the house, where he directly began playing a tense family scene with Jill Hennessy, in the role of his wife, and Rory Culkin, as their son.
Baldwin then returned to the driveway, to sit near a full-sized stuffed deer that was part of the apparatus of the film. Donaghy has the calm joy of someone who knows that nothing matters in life but ambition; Baldwin brings deadpan gravitas to a giddy parody of business egomania. What am I, a farmer?
This year, he received the same three nominations: he won the SAG Award, and on September 21st he will learn if he has won an Emmy. The idea is to hit certain beats, and we do it cleverly. But, you do a television show, you become a pastry chef. You know? He cares about classical music; he began to take an interest in his twenties. Hit a button, and then you sit back and listen, and they pay you for that. I spend the waking hours of my life saying things that other people think and say and do.
And behaving as someone else. I want to be me! I want to be myself! I definitely wandered between those two worlds.
I want you to know something: My father was tough. My father would chaperone at high-school dances, and the toughest guy in the high school used to want to fight my father. The kid was drunk; it was a big masculine challenge for him to pick a fight with my father. The older I got, I learned to behave as he did, which was to not be afraid of anybody. He really idolized him. Alec Baldwin began at George Washington University in , with the idea of going into law and becoming President of the United States.
At the end of his junior year, he split up with a girlfriend and lost a student-body election. Feeling underappreciated, he transferred to N. Baldwin did not graduate at that time many years later, he did. His father died around this time. One has to be satisfied with flared nostrils and a dangerous flash of teeth. The film eventually made two hundred million dollars. For many years, this skill was quite segregated from his day job as an alpha male.
The film was a commercial and critical disaster. And that movie was a very cookie-cutter thriller. It did pretty well. That was a bomb. They bombed. As Baldwin sees it, if his career had now moved past the stage of leading man, that was in part because he had become a father himself. Ireland, his daughter, was born in , two years after Baldwin and Basinger were married, on an East Hampton beach.
I always wanted children. And I think, in hindsight, I probably made a mistake, in the sense of my career. I always wonder where my career would be if I was more selfish. Billy is someone who gave it all up for his family.
And he has a lovely family. He stayed married to one person. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear about your divorce anymore. Baldwin and Klein—who is forty-one and married, with young children—chaperone each other to award shows or sit at home and order takeout. Which girl in sixth grade? I feel like I take care of him. He wanted to make it work. He was very committed. And therefore having it not work, for whatever reasons, was very difficult for him.
When I first spoke to Baldwin, one afternoon in the bar of a midtown hotel, we barely moved from the subject of his marriage and divorce for two hours.
I loved her the way I loved my father. I loved her the way I loved my mother. I loved her the way I loved people I cared about on the deepest level. In , Baldwin and Basinger spent the year in a rented house in Bridgehampton. They had bought a house in Amagansett, nearby, but it was being renovated.
Their daughter went to school locally. In December, the couple broke up, and Basinger took Ireland back to L. Basinger, through a representative, declined to comment for this article. In , after a period of improvised custody-sharing, Basinger and Baldwin entered litigation—Basinger now equipped with a lawyer whose name evokes, in Baldwin, a desire to find an insult that outperforms all earlier insults he has thrown at the man.
So, for example, in Baldwin agreed to attend a course of twelve anger-management sessions. The kid goes from five to six to eight. Kids have school, they have friends; the next thing—my daughter is twelve.
The goal of the alienating parent is to kill contiguous time. People need reliability. They need regularity. You wind up being more an uncle than a father.
It ate me alive. They came to me and said did I want to do a TV show. I never wanted to do a TV show. A moment or two later, Tina Fey carried her two-year-old daughter, in a pink jacket, through the studio.
The pilot was made. NBC saw it, and offered to take the show only if Baldwin was in all twenty-one episodes of the first season. Although originally conceived as a bullying antagonist to Liz Lemon, by the time of the pilot the character had already begun to expand into a fellow-protagonist, a cynic who guides a neurotic.
I think he said that. Lorne is a big-ticket A-list New York water buffalo. This show is the red-headed stepchild in the lineup. I saw it. We kept meeting. I got down on my knees. That day at Silvercup Studios, the cast and crew ate tacos at long communal tables. He has hosted the show thirteen times.
At fourteen, he would draw level with Steve Martin, the record holder. They argued back and forth. With my daughter! The not-so-little Ireland. Five feet ten. Five feet ten! Baldwin has rather courtly manners.
In fact, to quote Tracy Jordan, 30 Rock loved the joke so much it took it I reckon 30 Rock had enough great one-liners to fill an encyclopedia and cure depression. A Subway Performer's Application Essay to Juilliard. Every essay in 30 Rock and Philosophy takes some of my favorite scenes from the show and uses them to explain important philosophical issues. Even the most.
Kenneth redefines "goody two shoes", but what does it really mean to be good? Leo Spaceman routinely demonstrates that medicine is not a science, so what is the role of the incompetent professional in America today? In 30 Rock and Philosophy, Tina Fey and her fellow cast members are thrust onto the philosophical stage with Plato, Aristotle, Kantand other great thinkers to examine these key questions and many others that involve the characters and plotlines of 30 Rock and its fictional TGS with Tracy Jordan comedy show. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App.
He is fifty years old, divorced, and lives alone in an old white farmhouse in the Hamptons and an apartment on Central Park West—feeling thwarted, if not quite persecuted.
Liz demurs, then concedes. The show spent seven seasons as one of the best in the recent history of television.
Top 5 ‘30 Rock’ Episodes, Curated by a Proudly Biased Superfan
In , I realized one of my childhood dreams. Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity. This must be how people feel when they really do go to school naked by accident. Then I sat on a couch and waited for my meeting with Lorne. To this day, the smell of fresh popcorn causes me to experience stress, hunger, and sketch ideas for John Goodman. So, when I was finally ushered into his office, I sat down, determined not to blow it.
Follow the Authors
The prestigious comedy prize has been awarded to the wrong person. Not because Fey isn't funny -- at times, she is roaringly so -- but rather because she has failed, catastrophically, in creating a popular comedy that comments on American race relations in a manner appropriate for As a matter of fact, Fey may be the head of one of the most backwards projects in popular culture. A few weeks ago, Fey was nominated for an honor named after one of our nation's most iconic writers, because "as a social commentator, satirist and creator of characters, Samuel Clemens [Mark Twain's birth name] was a fearless observer of society, who startled many while delighting and informing many more with his uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly. The character of Tracy Jordan played by Tracy Morgan is an unsightly amalgamation of every nefarious trope about African Americans conceived of in the past two centuries in the history of our republic. Tracy Jordan is a caricature's caricature; his role in 30 Rock is almost as if the writers earnestly studied minstrelsy, and then went about extending the tradition in the most ambitious manner possible. Given that the show received a record-breaking 22 Emmy Award nominations in alone, this may be reason for concern. Before the people who disdain cultural theory attempt to dismiss this analysis on the grounds that entertainment should be divorced from social critique, it should be noted: Fey's award is at its essence about social commentary, and it is inarguable that Fey's show deliberately and enthusiastically wrestles with issues of race, class, and gender. On race, she is firmly pinned under the weight of her own monster. Tracy is the star of the show and a blight on its production.
Last night on NBC's "30 Rock," Tina Fey and company dove head first into the mud-wrestling match that is the ongoing conversation about women in contemporary comedy. The show took particular interest in the recent kerfuffle that erupted when unofficially-feminist-but-totally-feminist women's pop-culture website Jezebel took on the beloved "Daily Show" for not featuring enough women as on-air talent or in the writers room, and for its hiring of lissome-but-arguably-not-hilarious Olivia Munn as a token female cast-member.
Now more than ever, it helps bookstores, communities, and all humanity to buy books through your independent retailer. Click here for ways you can help. If you have any appreciation for well-crafted jokes, you were likely a fan of 30 Rock. In addition to plenty of other virtues — the immortal Jack-Liz friendship, the pitch-perfect satire of corporations and TV, the utter absurdity — this show was like porn for joke lovers.
Lessons from Late Night
News that the cult favorite 30 Rock left Netflix this month sparked a series of frantic reactions on certain corners of the internet. Liz is a frowning brunette killjoy; Jenna is all blonde ambition and horse glue. Followship Award. But in this post-sheet cake moment, it is harder for me to sit with this shallow feminism. And those of us for whom feminism helps queer our lives, rather than serving as a belief set that reconciles us toward marriage, motherhood, and the workplace? A struggling actress upstaged on her own show, she deals with a pathological need for attention along with more universal female complaints such as weight gain and ageist beauty standards. Her issues, however, become less normative as the show continues. Instead of revolving around the tragedy of an old crone yearning for the spotlight, her storylines in later seasons consider how to pair love with kink, and the need for attention with the desire to please. And if you steal it from me, I will kill myself, and then you. Jenna spends her adult life dodging death at the hands of dangerous boyfriends, most famously, Mickey Rourke. On 30 Rock , when trauma resurfaces, it is always treated as a moment of wild comedy. Other main characters on the show have moments of unearthing repressed trauma and are somewhat better off after talking it out. Jenna, however, never has her breakthrough on the couch, not because she is too shallow to bury anything deep, but perhaps because she does not repress that much. Her asides about her own traumas have the horrifying buoyancy of a woman who walks away with a stride of pride. Violent exes are her specialty, including but not limited to O.
"30 Rock" takes on feminist hypocrisy -- and its own
I love to play strippers and to imitate them. I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going there? I feel like we all need to be better than that. That industry needs to die, by all of us being a little bit better than that. In a interview, Betty Friedan suggested to Simone de Beauvoir that women who wanted to stay home and raise their children had a right to do so. They were a female Entourage without a chubby Turtle. Because they all need to be better than that. What would be wrong with her doing it just because she felt like it?
