30something
I have fallen head over heels in love with 30 Rock. I watched the start of season one when it "premiered" on Five way back in 2007 (a year after it has begun in the States) and I admit, I was not taken by it. A bit too slick, was my initial judgment - also, it coincided with the arrival of Aaron Sorkin's godlike Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, with which 30 Rock shared an identical set-up: the backstage goings-on at a Saturday Night Live-style sketch comedy show in a major American city. Incredibly, both shows debuted in the same season on NBC, although only 30 Rock is actually set at the offices of NBC (30, Rockefeller Plaza) and takes the piss out of its parent broadcaster - Studio 60 invented the fictional "NBS". History tells us that Sorkin's more ambitious, hour-slot comedy-drama was doomed to be yanked off after one season, while 30 Rock, the less ambitious, half-hour-slot comedy-non-drama, went on to a second and now third season, with armfuls of Emmys and Golden Globes for its troubles. When creator and star Tina Fey and star Alec Baldwin went up to collect their Globes this year, I felt slightly disconnected from the fuss.And then, last week, Front Row asked me to preview the second season, which is about to belatedly start on Five, and they kindly sent me the entire set of 15 (a reduced series due to the writers' strike). I watched the first two, reviewed it, favourably, and then ended up bingeing on the remaining 13 over the weekend, in bite-sized 20-minute chunks (which is the actual length of a half-hour sitcom in America, of course). I was officially hooked when, in Episode 2, Jenna (female star of the show-within-a-show - sweet but self-obsessed and played by Jane Krakowski), who'd put on weight after appearing in Mystic Pizza: The Musical, went to see the network doctor. He said, "For your height, your weight puts you in what we call the 'disgusting' range." and then suggested she take crystal meth, to help lose the weight, asking, "How important is tooth retention to you?" I don't know what it was about that scene, but they had me at "disgusting". This is a slick show, but within those 20 precious minutes all five of the principal characters - Liz, Jack, Jenna, Tracy, Kenneth - gets a storyline and all five are tied up. Sometimes one of the supporting characters gets an arc too. Maybe the second season is a lot better than the first, I don't know, but when it's good, it's on fire.
As a comedy set in the media, specifically TV, it's in a fine American tradition: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore, Garry Shandling, Larry Sanders, Murphy Brown, Sports Night ... but for all the in-jokes about network television and NBC specifically, it's really about relationships. There's a sly dig at Aaron Sorkin and Studio 60 in Episode 3. Liz (Tina Fey) says to NBC page Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), "Can you walk and talk?" To which he replies, "Usually, but now you got me thinking about it." At which he attempts to coordinate walking and talking. It's a quick gag, and - hey! - does not drive the story, but it's priceless.
In Ep 5, network exec Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), does a walk-and-talk with Liz and reads through some audience research: "Look how he's testing, they love him in every demographic: coloured people, broads, fairies, Commies ... gosh, we've gotta update these forms." I can't do it justice by typing these lines up. Have a look this Friday on Five USA.
Incidentally, I purchased the Season One box set this morning. If you buy it on iTunes, it costs an astronomical £41.99 - and that's an invisible version. I checked Amazon, where the same "item" (if the downloadable version can indeed be called an "item") retailed for £10.98. Then I checked HMV.com, where the same item was ... £9.99. I'm sure you could probably get it even cheaper secondhand, but I'm more than happy to part with ten quid for a three-disc set containing 21 episodes and 448 minutes of classic US comedy. Who in their right mind would download it from iTunes? I mean, really? (Unless they were desperate to watch it on their iPhone, of course.)
posted by Andrew Collins @ 8:16 AM
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28 Comments:
I've been interested in watching this, and your thumbs up added to all the other may just tip me over into giving yet more time to American TV.
I stuck with Studio 60, though it grated that the characters dealt with a comedy show with the same gravitas the White House staff treated political events in the West Wing. Much as I miss Sorkin's style and dialogue I think its cancellation was fair.
I'm not sure i agree with you Andy....its good only in very sparse bits....you should watch season 3 as well on sidereel.com...
Shyam
I've been a big fan since the episode where Jack demonstrated his negotiating technique, whereby he has a higher chair than his opponents. When the second round of negotiation arrived, he'd taken away their chairs completely.
I'm finding the latest season a bit off-putting however as everyone's voices seem unusally low. Something to do with the translation of US to UK TV I'm guessing. Ted Danson used to complain that whenever he saw Cheers when in the UK he thought he'd inhaled helium. Perhaps Five USA is overcompensating.
Penry
Personally, I still prefer s1 of Studio 60 to s1 of 30Rock. But I can also see why 30Rock survived - it had some idea of what it was for, whereas Studio 60 feels like "let's give Sorkin something to do." And, of course, Sorkin already did his best media jokes in Sports Night...
However, the whole subject of "broadcast" tv is much more interesting. I'm hardly ever watching (or even listening to) anything when actually it goes out "live" these days - I'd almost never listen to the podcast if it were a regularly scheduled show. I will often download an older show, and then, if I like it, I go and buy the dvd boxset; yes, I'm one of those people who has spent a lot more as a result of "pirating" than I ever did before.
-- David
Glad to hear you've picked up on 30 Rock. I watched the whole of the first series when it was on Five and have also seen the 2nd and some of the 3rd. A few people I know seem to have watched one or two eps at the start of the first season and didn't persevere with it but they really missed out. It may have taken a few episodes to settle but the first season was wonderful. Alec Baldwin is just brilliant as Donaghy and it's full of quick, snappy gags and great characters. Fey deserves the kudos for this rather than Palin impressions (and Mean Girls which she wrote and is also very good). I thought the Seinfeld starring episode was a little weak but it gets better. Can I also suggest you try 'How I Met Your Mother', another neglected over here but excellent US sitcom (it's shown on Living but box sets are available since you don't have Sky)
On the subject of negleted American sitcoms, I would recomend Arrested Development. Apparently not easy to get into because of the number of characters, lack of laughter track, layering of jokes, but in my humble and much derided opinion, the finest comedy show of any country, of all time.
Penry
Thought you might be interested to know that Jon Gaunt was on the daily politics today talking about smokers being prevented from fostering kids again.
John
I too have also recently binged on 30 Rock - at the expense of doing any work of any kind. My highlight of Season 2 came in Episode 6: 'I'm going to a party tonight honouring Robert Novak. It's being thrown by John McCain and Jack Bauer.' I literally spat out the beans on toast I was eating. I'm glad other people are enjoying it too.
I'm going to have to add it to my watch list - I almost wet myself laughing at the line you quoted:
"Look how he's testing, they love him in every demographic: coloured people, broads, fairies, Commies ... gosh, we've gotta update these forms."
Comedy gold
It's absolutely fantastic in my opinion, the funniest thing since Seinfeld ended. And despite all the celebrity cameos, surely Will Arnett provides the funniest of all as the rival for Jack's job.
Sadly, very few in the U.K. seem to know/care about it. And with all due respect to C5, I feel it's wasted there and should be on primetime mainstream TV. But then Seinfeld was thrown away in a nothing slot too.
MILF Island. Sorry but that made me laugh like a drain.
I have not watched it. I don't think I've watched any of the imported American shows in the past five years.
Is that through a concerted effort to repel US imperialism, Dean? Or just through a kind of long-running accident? Only, there have been some terrific imported US shows over the past five years. I won't list them.
Couldn't agree more Andy. If you take the cream of US TV output (and ignore the chaff, to make a metaphor mess) in recent years the quality is stunning. It's been said elsewhere so I won't labour the point, but TV is really putting a lot of cinema output in the shade.
It's clear that the main factor that makes US dramas rise above UK is the money poured into it (mainly on writers), but it does, IMO, make it difficult to watch UK TV dramas.
Glad you've given it another chance. Watch out for Emily Mortimer's appearance in Season 1. She gets a fantastic line about John and Yoko.
The £41.99 price on iTunes is for the HD version. The SD version is £31.99. That's still astronomical but I suppose the odd epsiode at £1.89 each might be attractive if you've missed one.
I still can't get into this. It raises some smiles, but it just seems like an episode of Larry Sanders updated a bit. It's nice to see people like Will Arnett in this, but it just seems ordinary.
But at least it's enjoyable, unlike Free Agents, which is almost unwatchable. It's just horrid, smarmy people!
On a plus point, I watched Not Going Out for the first time last week and found it very nice and jolly :)
I saw one episode of the first series when it was on TV (the one with LL Cool J). I thought it was alright, but didn't bother watching the rest of the series.
Then a couple of weeks ago my brother leant me the S1 box set and I blitzed through it all in a couple of days, laughing from start to finish.
I've also seen S2, but for my money it wasn't as good as the first. I didn't know S3 had started yet, so I'll go find it now.
Also, there have been more great US sitcoms in the past few years than there were in the entire 20th Century.
Andrew, I don't really get too hung up about the US vs UK drama/comedy debate. I could care less usually. However as a writer for 'telly' yourself, I'd like to ask if writing really does improve if you throw money at it, as is implied in an earlier comment. Is it that more money = more writers = more ideas or is it more money = better writers etc?
After all Fools and Horses, Dad's Army, porridge, steptoe didn't have teams and they seemed to have stood the test of time. Also I enjoyed the series 'ideal' very much and that only seemed to have one writer.
Glad to see somebody else giving this show a little love and attention. It richly deserves it. I only wished more people watched the thing. It makes me worry that it'll go the way of "Arrested Development", another marvelous US sitcom which people should also invest in. It's probably going for cheap online somewhere.
Stephen, did you catch Law & Order UK on ITV on Monday? Really surprisingly good, I thought. (Alison Graham in RT disagrees, as does Sarah Dempster in the Guardian.) I expect almost nothing from ITV drama, but give most new series a chance, expecting to switch over after 10 minutes of being treated like a fool, but Law & Order had a really nice, relaxed feel, and the cast were top-rote, even Bradley Walsh.
To answer your question Peekay: it's not that money equals better comedy, it's just that in America they run series to around 21 episodes usually, and that's physically beyond one writer. (Aaron Sorkin wrote nearly all of West Wing on his own until he burned out, but he's from another galaxy.) We now have a squad of around eight extra gag writers on Not Going Out. We've always had a couple, but this time, we're paying for a few more. Does that make the show better? It's hard to say. Lee is a volcano of gags, but once you've set a high gag-rate from show one, you have to keep it up, and Lee's not so egotistical that he won't let anyone else come up with funnies.
I'm currently working on a pilot script for a sitcom that will be "authored" ie. it's all mine, and only I will write it - if it's commissioned, which is by no means certain. However, it's planned as a six-parter. If it was 21 parts, how could I contemplate writing it all? It would kill a single writer. Which is why Tina Fey only writes a couple of episodes in each season of 30 Rock. It's her baby, she created it, she produces it and oversees it, but if you have good writers, they'll write to the house style.
To go back to your original point, Peekay, the classic British sitcoms were all written by a fixed team (Cleese and Booth, Clement and La Frenais, Galton and Simpson, Larbey and Esmonde, Croft and Perry, Gervais and Merchant) or a single writer (Eric Chappell, Roy Clarke). That will always be the case, I suspect. Whereas the classic US sitcoms were written by a gang, even if they were initially conceived by a single writer/performer. That's just the practical demands of their system over ours. We do eight episodes, they do 20.
Of course, Richard Herring and Al Murray wrote 37 episodes of Time Gentlemen Please, which Sky ordered up in "American" blocks, so there's always an exception.
I've not seen L&O:UK, but I'm glad it gets your thumbs up as I thought it might be an embarrassment to the UK if Yanks see it and get the acting 'talents' of Martha Jones from Doctor Who.
In addition to valuing the writing process in the US, it seems actors in American dramas are nearly always good. Even child actors. Watch a child actor in any UK show and they're nearly always terrible. US child actors are often scarily good.
(Though I wonder if that's always a good sign. What sort of a childhood has a 7 year who's great at acting had?)
But US dramas tend to be more sophisticated too. Watch ER and Holby City and you'll notice real differences, and not just in the budgets or acting. (Not seen HC in years, so couldn't say if it's improved.)
Take for example the death of a child depicted in each of them. ER will mostly trust the audience to know it will devastate the parents and generally won't feel the need to include the scene of the parents being told. At most you might see a doctor going into the room to see them and the door shutting, with the camera pulling away. In Holby City you'll see the kid die, you'll see the doctors upset, you'll get a scene with the doctors talking about how the parents need to be told and how they'll be devastated, then you'll get a scene of the parents being told and being devastated.
It makes me want to shout at the TV "Where's the economy in your art for goodness sake?"
Not that there isn't good UK drama. ITV seem to do (often rural) murder shows quite well (Frost, Morse etc). The Americans (or at least a portion of them) lap these up, I gather. Doctor Who does well within its limitations. I don't watch enough UK TV to know what else is good.
I'll join the chorus of Arrested Development praise. That show was just astoundingly good. If 30 Rock is comparable to that in any way then where do I sign up? (Answer: HMV.co.uk)
I love 30 Rock and Studio 60 but I would not have described Studio 60 as Comedy Drama. That implies that it relied on laughs to get it's audience. the comedy was merely a part of the subject matter, as much as the goings on in Afghanistan.
The fact that it wasn't comedy about a comedy probably confused the target audience.
I'm sure we all know this but it's worth just saying it. Galton and Simpson somehow managed 102 radio episodes of Hancock's Half Hour in five years, plus 46 TV episodes within that same period (with more to come after the radio series finished). A different world and all that, and radio is a whole different thing anyway. But it's a phenomenal achievement. You can see the joins in a lot of those shows - scenes irrelevant to "the plot" that are clearly just padding, etc. But the quality really doesn't let up. There's at least one laugh-out-loud line in every one of the (extant) radio episodes - and I rarely laugh out loud even at stuff I like. I love that show.
Boys becoming men. MEN becoming WOLVES!
Sorry, but there were another couple of paragraphs that went with my previous post that I somehow contrived not to send. They went something like this:
Galton and Simpson's forte was, I think, writing conversations from which humour arose naturally. There aren't huge numbers of actual gags, and consequently there aren't the kind of often jarringly illogical contrived interjections that are usally required to set up gags. If you're able to do it, then I suppose it's quicker to write such stuff. I always imagine them working by actually having those conversations between themselves and writing them down.
Without wishing to make too close a comparison - because they're obviously two very different things - there is a sort of parallel to be drawn with what you and Richard are doing. While there's clearly a place for teams of people re-writing something to perfection, it's often a case of polishing a turd. It's good that there's still a place for funny people just getting on with being funny.
Dave makes an interesting point there. We know that the podcast can help Rich go off in his flights of fancy which suits his comedy style and so it's likely (or at least conceivable) it will help his work.
Do you find the commitment of sitting down once a week and talking rot to RKH is any help with your writing?
I've been a big fan of 30 Rock from the start and although the first episode of Season 2 was bit weak (and I got the feeling that Seinfeld only agreed to do it if he could do those crass plugs for his Bee Movie!) the later episodes are much better. Also they did a "walk and talk" gag in the first series as well and it was in a way which was much more blatantly a dig at Mr Sorkin.
Thanks for pointing the way to the cheap DVD Andrew - I caught a few episodes of this a year or so ago on Channel 5 and htought it was excellent, and am thoroughly enjoying the boxset.
Jim, London
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