“30 Rock” — Cougars
One-Armed Mermaid That’s Part Unicorn with Bigfoot
Woah, a new episode of 30 Rock! Who knew? Being fairly preoccupied this month I had just assumed that the show ran out of new episodes when The Office dried up the week after the strike started. Needless to say it was a pip to see a fresh episode waiting for me on the DVR Thursday night. That the episode also happened to be laugh-out-loud funny was an added bonus. Funny aside, I did have some problems with the episode which I will detail after the jump…
First the funny. Here are three moments that struck me as particularly laugh-worthy:
- Jack to Liz after seeing the guy she’s dating: “Where did you meet, an amber alert?”
- Liz to Jack trying to change the subject at a gallery opening: “The art in here is hung really level!”
- Tracy to Jack angry about coaching the baseball team from “Knuckle Beach”: “Meetings? Practice? What is this a marriage?
OK. Now that we’ve established that the episode made me laugh on numerous occasions allow me to express some mild criticism: a lot of the best material this week I had already seen on Arrested Development. Look, I know this is unfair. Comparing anything to Arrested Development is like comparing “apples to some other fruit.” AD is the best. THE BEST. But the longer 30 Rock is on the air and the longer it remains consistently hilarious the more it is going to have to defend itself against the champ. This week, all of the Iraq stuff (mirrored against Tracy’s little league team), while funny, smacked of watered down AD jokes. The difference is that Arrested Development was a show of the Iraq war, while 30 Rock (at best) can be described as a reaction. Both are funny, but doing what Arrested Development did so close to when it actually happened kind of puts everything else to shame (which is too bad because “Fun Time Accomplished” is kind of fantastic).
Similarly, I felt like Frank’s gay-attraction to the coffee-boy felt an awful lot like everything Brian Posehn and Steve Agee have done on The Sarah Silverman Program (playing two of the “straightest” gay guys on the planet), though this could also be because I just kind of associate Judah Friedlander with Brian Posehn — so maybe this isn’t so much a criticism of the show as a criticism with how my mind connects dots. Either way I felt like I had seen it before.
December 1st, 2007 at 7:24 pm
I thought Lemon had a lot of really good lines in this episodes - the art being hung so level, breaking down and saying “I’m 37, please don’t make me go to Brooklyn,” and talking about not wanting to buy clothes at Abercrombie because “it’s too loud in there.” I feel like that character has a very specific emotional reaction to almost everything that has gotten much stronger as the series has gone on. It could feel forced, but it doesn’t.
What does feel forced? The Judah Friedlander gay for Jamie thing, totally. Good call. You have seen that before, if you went to a college where frat guys made jokes. Every time he ran into the picture yesterday I just wanted to get out my remote control fly swatter and get him off the screen so it could go back to being a good episode. And the Iraq thing, yeah, while funny, sometimes felt a little paint-by-numbers.