See, this is what I’m talking about! Tonight’s 30 Rock was hilarious, as it always is, and even featured the real-life mayor of the great city of New York Michael R. Bloomberg but seriously, what the hell was Tim Conway doing there? His story had absolutely nothing to do with anything! Why even have it? Blarg, indeed!
Really?
30 Rock might be the smartest and funniest comedy currently on television. It’s certainly in the top three. That being said, can we really heap upon it praise after praise when it consistently delivers the most uninspired B-stories this side of Full House. For as sharp as this show’s writing can be, I simply don’t understand why every episode tends to have a secondary arc (usually involving Pete) rife with cliché. I mean, really? Pete get’s his hand stuck in a vending machine?
This has made me realize that 30 Rock is perhaps too tight for its own good. Take away these completely idiotic and disjointed B-stories and do you know what you’re left with? A fifteen minute show. They might as well cut it down and just put it on after Aqua Teen on Adult Swim (making it without a doubt the most expensive 15 minutes on television).
Though perhaps the lameness of these stories is the joke. Maybe they’re a parody of the type of sitcom fare that usually gets an audience to respond. That has to be the case, right? A show this funny wouldn’t produce material so tepid otherwise, right?
Whomever or whoever? Enjoy this awesome clip from perhaps my favorite episode of The Office ever, “Money,” courtesy of Hulu.
Living in something of a television black-hole with almost obscene amounts of free-time, I’ve frequently found myself over at the NBC/FOX video-joint Hulu, which just went public a few weeks back. As far as sanctioned video is concerned, there might not be a better destination online (though I will also add that the revamped Daily Show website is wholly usable). So far I’ve re-watched the first half of this season’s episodes of The Office, more than a few 30 Rocks, The Jerk, The Three Amigos and (strangely?) Dude, Where’s My Car. The experience, which is where any video-based website lives and dies, is so good I almost want to classify it as “feel-good.” There’s something almost novel about the notion of getting content that for so long has been on the fringes of legality now packaged in a super-slick wrapper sanctioned by all of the powers that be (including our once-short-shrifted writers). More after the jump…
