Oprah Winfrey and Tina Fey Have Comic Chemistry to Spare on "30 Rock"
By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives
Tina Fey’s ratings challenged sitcom 30 Rock may have made its official season premiere last week, but in my opinion it is this week’s far superior episode that kicks the show into hilarious high gear after its prolonged break and best illustrates why it deserved to win so many top Emmys in September.
Last Thursday’s telecast delivered the series’ highest ratings ever among total viewers and adults 18-49, but had that premiere come this week the numbers might have been even higher. It is not surprising that so many new viewers sampled the show -- how could they resist, with Fey coming off the pop-culture super-nova surrounding her impersonation of Gov. Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live? But I have to think that this week’s endlessly clever episode, featuring Oprah Winfrey in what may turn out to be the highest profile guest appearances of the 2008-09 television season, will do much more not simply to attract new viewers to the show but to keep them coming back for more.
Throughout its relatively brief history, the merrily madcap 30 Rock has kept critics consistently enthralled despite the wildly uneven quality of its storytelling. Some weeks the show just starts up and plays out until it stops dead, leaving me wishing that I had surrendered the previous half-hour of my life to more rewarding entertainment, such as its two top-notch time period competitors, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Supernatural. (Last week’s episode, about Liz Lemon’s doomed efforts to please an investigator from an adoption agency who was tasked with determining if Liz would be a fit parent, was one of those laugh-challenged disappointments.)
But just when I’m ready to write it off, Rock rebounds with a half-hour of inspired lunacy the likes of which I rarely find on American television, especially in prime time. This week’s episode is one of those gems, and Winfrey is right there holding her own in the middle of it all. The swirling comic chemistry between the two in scenes that find Winfrey seated next to Fey’s heavily drugged Liz on a commercial airliner is simply delightful. (Despite the scary warning on the bottle that reads, “May cause dizziness, sexual nightmares and sleep crime,” Liz takes pills to calm her nerves during the flight.) Unfortunately, I can’t go into any detail about this particular storyline, because it takes a surprise turn mid-way through the episode that quadruples the fun. I’ll just say that, overall, it proves to be such a strong comedic showcase for Fey that she very well may take home a second Emmy next year as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
The entire 30 Rock cast is well-served by this half-hour, especially Emmy winner Alec Baldwin as fallen General Electric bigwig Jack Donaghy, who is wasting no time this season scheming his way right back to the top, and the invaluable Jack McBrayer as squirrely NBC page Kenneth. After enjoying his first night with a new flat-screen TV (a gift from Jack) and stolen cable television service, Kenneth breathlessly tells the big man, “There’s a whole channel on the cable that just tells you what’s on the other channels!” He’s all serious business when he then asks, “Is SpongeBob SquarePants supposed to be terrifying?”
“Darn right he is,” Jack replies.
Meanwhile, Tracy (Tracy Morgan) and Jenna (Jane Krakowski), at war over compensation involving a video game, engage in a “social experiment” to determine who has it harder in America, white women or black men. Tracy is an absolute horror in whiteface with a blonde wig and a plastic monster claw over one hand. (“They ran out of makeup because I insisted they do my buttocks,” he explains.) Jenna is similarly shocking in blackface.
Baldwin and McBrayer get the best lines in this bit, too. Put off by the quarrel between Tracy and Jenna, Jack bloviates, “I’ll tell you who has it hardest. White men! We make the unpopular difficult decisions, the tough choices. We land on the moon and Normandy Beach and yet they resent us.”
“I’m sorry to disagree,” Kenneth timidly interrupts. “But I am also a white man.”
“Socio-economically speaking, you are more like an inner-city Latina,” Jack replies.
But the funniest lines throughout go to Fey -- and she delivers them with the same subdued punch that served Mary Tyler Moore so well as news producer Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Like Moore’s Richards, Fey’s Lemon is positioned as the calm center amid the comic storm of her colorful co-workers. The comparison is valid, even if Moore’s show was rooted in and grounded by a timely realism that is far outside the wholly unreal lunacy of 30 Rock. When a swoony, hopelessly star-struck Liz says to Jack, “She’s coming, Jack. Oprah is coming. And she’s going to fix everything!”, you just know that Winfrey’s arrival at the office is going to set Liz up for the same kind of embarrassment Mary often suffered at her legendarily disastrous dinner parties, especially those attended by people of note (including, in one unforgettable episode, the one and only Johnny Carson).
We may have seen the last of Fey’s ferociously funny impersonation of Sarah Palin for a while, but that will be okay as long as her Liz Lemon keeps Rock rolling.
Ed Martin
Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…
