It was a Wednesday night, October 11, 2006, when Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon first bought an entire hot dog cart’s worth of hot dogs just to spite some jerk who cut in line, and the world was introduced to 30 Rock.
Looking back now, it’s clear we were in the midst of a golden age for workplace sitcoms. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s superlative, groundbreaking The Office had run from 2001 to 2003, paving the way for the Steve Carell-starring American adaptation that arrived in 2005 and quickly became a television juggernaut.
Britain’s The IT Crowd also debuted around the same time, while a couple of years later Fey’s longtime collaborator Amy Poehler brought Parks and Recreation, her big-hearted take on small-town government, to screens.
Amidst all that competition, however, 30 Rock always stood out as something special. By the time it came to an end after seven seasons in 2013, it had proved itself weirder, smarter and sharper than anything else on television. More to the point, it was simply funnier than its rivals.
In a fastidious 2014 survey, The Atlantic writer Talib Visram found that 30 Rock has an astounding joke-per-minute rate of 7.44, more than any other sitcom he examined. In terms of laugh density, the show is the closest thing we’ve ever had to a live-action version of The Simpsons (before it went downhill).
Fey, of course, had a wealth of experience to draw on as the first female head writer of Saturday Night Live. She first joined the long-running sketch show in 1997 as a behind-the-scenes writer, before eventually working her way into the cast (and behind the Weekend Update desk) in 2000. While still working as the show’s head writer, she’d gone off to Hollywood and enjoyed great success with her first-ever movie script: 2004’s Mean Girls.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t originally her idea to take viewers behind the scenes at an NBC sketch show based out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. She originally pitched the network a sitcom where she would have played the producer to Alec Baldwin’s on-air Bill O’Reilly-style blowhard news commentator.
Much like Aaron Sorkin and HBO later did with The Newsroom, she envisioned a show that would wrap real-life current affairs into the narrative. “It was good we didn’t try to do that, because I would have drowned trying to keep up with the subject matter,” Fey told Rolling Stone in 2013.
It was actually an NBC exec who suggested she mine her experience in the SNL writing room. “It seemed so lazy to just write about writing,” Fey recalled thinking, but she reconsidered when she hit upon the idea of casting her former SNL castmate Tracy Morgan as one of the show’s stars. “I thought, ‘Oh, this could be a thing.’”
The chaotic Morgan, who played a character named Tracy Jordan, did indeed become one of the most hilarious and unpredictable weapons in the show’s arsenal (in one memorably meta sequence, he can be heard off-screen yelling: “We’re on a show within a show! My real name is Tracy Morgan!”) but, as with all great workplace comedies, 30 Rock thrived because of its ensemble.
There was Fey herself as the schlubby Liz Lemon, essentially a version of her own personality as a writer at SNL before she started appearing on screen. “I wouldn’t want her to do anything that I wouldn’t do,” she once said of the character. In the pilot episode, Liz’s female-focused sketch comedy series, The Girlie Show, starring Jane Krakowski’s wildly narcissistic Jenna Maroney, is forced by a meddling NBC executive to take on Jordan as its new male star.
That executive was a never-better Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy, whose ambition to rise through the ranks of NBC’s real-life parent company General Electric was matched only by the sharpness of his suits (“It’s after six,” he once remarked after being asked by Lemon why he was wearing a tuxedo. “What am I, a farmer?”). The character, partly inspired by SNL creator Lorne Michaels, was officially known as the Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming, a ridiculous job title that only seems more prescient in our current age of mergers and endless media giant consolidation.
While 30 Rock could be silly, it didn’t shy away from sharp-witted satire. When GE sold NBCUniversal to Comcast in 2011, the takeover was spoofed as the network being sold to family-owned TV company Kabletown within the world of the show. “It’s a fine and generous company,” said Lemon nervously, breaking the fourth wall to look directly down the camera.
The show was never a major ratings hit during its initial run on air, pulling in an audience of 5 to 7 million at its peak. For context, that’s about half the audience who were watching The Big Bang Theory at the time. Nevertheless, Fey’s show became a critical darling, winning a total of 16 Emmys, including a three-year run as Outstanding Comedy between 2007 and 2009.
Today, 30 Rock lives on via streaming (on Peacock in the U.S. and Netflix in the U.K.) and through the wide variety of deathless memes it spawned, from Steve Buscemi playing a terrible undercover cop uttering: “How do you do, fellow kids?” to Liz’s weary “What a week, huh?” being volleyed back by Jack’s: “Lemon, it’s Wednesday.”
The show also gained a reputation for an almost Simpsons-esque prescience after many of its spoof shows and movies were ushered into reality. Most famously, the show’s reality show satire MILF Island (“Twenty-five super hot moms. Fifty eighth-grade boys. No rules.”) preceded the all-too-real 2023 TLC series MILF Manor, and it also predicted celebrities being inserted into shows by AI avatar and 10-second microshows. “Most of the fake shows were just heightened versions of what was already happening,” Fey recently told The Ringer. “So yeah, not surprised that we actually ended up with MILF Island. We’re a fallen society.”
As for Fey, in the years since 30 Rock ended, she’s gone from a Liz to a Jack. She now heads her own sprawling media empire estimated to be worth up to $150 million, with a production company behind a string of hit shows as well as a Mean Girls Broadway musical. She’s also long been rumored as the most likely successor to Lorne Michaels if and when he ever releases his steely grip on SNL.
Whether or not Fey takes that tricky job, and whatever else she creates, it seems unlikely she’ll ever top the wild brilliance of 30 Rock. As thick and fast as the jokes came, it was also a show with real heart. In the finale, as Jack struggled to find the words, Liz told him simply: “I love you too, Jack.” Their platonic, teasing, ultimately supportive relationship helped create the sort of workplace where you’d be more than happy to stay late. Time for a rewatch.