No we're not referring to the ratings.
Yes, 30 Rock has again cratered. Each season it does, each season, fewer and fewer people watch. They even joked about it Thursday night when Liz (Tina Fey) said of Paul (Will Forte) proposing to Jenna (Jane Krakowski) the TGS show, "Wow, 2.5 million people just saw that." Guest star Kim Kardashian caught the proposal on her cell phone and Tweeted it, "Now 14 million people just saw it, you're welcome." Yes, the ratings are low, but we're referring to the so-called 'critical' reaction to the crap NBC aired Thursday.
There were two shows. One was aired live in the Central and EST time zones, the other was aired live in the PST time zone. Kim Kardashian guested on the West Coast version. Thanks to Paul McCartney's awful performance (he was on the East Coast version), Kardashian looked especially accomplished.
This was 30 Rock's second attempt at a live show. They tried it last season as well. It's a ratings stunt, that's all it is and it did help, the show almost got three and half-million viewers. Almost. In a real world, this show would be canned and, when NBC announces the fall line up, it may have to explain why certain shows that performed got the axe but 30 Rock came back.
Last year, the live show was all about Liz having a birthday and everyone forgetting. It was so weak, it wouldn't have made for a minor Phyllis and Bess subplot on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. However, that was positively Marguerite Young-ian compared to what they offered this year: To save money, Jack wants TGS taped and not live and so they're about to do their last live show when Kenneth The Former Page locks them in the dressing room of Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) until they agree to keep the live format.
"That's the beauty of live TV," Tina Fey declares mugging at and looking towards the studio audience, "anything can happen!" Anything could have but what didn't happen was a tribute to live television or Tina Fey coming off like an actress.
Yet, oh, how they rushed to lie. Meredith Blake (AV Club -- we're told it's like Sam's Club but less glamorous), Hampton Stevens (The Atlantic), Chris Harnick (Huffington Post) and Breia I-Hate-Women Brissey (who found the right place to take her sexism, Entertainment Weekly). [Stevens appears to have attempted to tell some critical truths; however, facts fail him.]
This was a tribute to live television! The Water Cooler Set loves to lie and whore for Tina Fey. The big news was that she (again) demonstrated she can't act. Her comedy rhythms are created in editing. Without the knobs to control her vocals, she comes off squeaky and high-pitched. And she can't maintain character in a scene. In a single-camera format (a film or 30 Rock's usual method of recording the show), editing can hide all that.
In a multi-cam format, she's exposed as very untalented. Untalented and with a really bad habit of mugging into the camera -- into -- and an inability to pause during laughter or applause. That was most evident when she declared (West Coast version), "Watch you get all red faced on TV, [audience begins clapping] that night I found [audience stops clapping] my calling, sticking it to the man!" She also had a tendency to move on allegedly humorous lines that she should have been still for. In both the East and West Coast versions, she never could sell "stick it to the man" as funny. Some might argue it wasn't. She also flubbed a line ("Henna or Jay -- Hazel or Jenna will know that we're missing") and railroaded through it instead of mugging. That might have been the only point at which her shameless mugging might have worked.
Bad acting, sadly, also came from Alec Baldwin reminding keen observers of why the film industry washed their hands of the notion that he was a leading man leaving TV to come to his rescue. This was especially notable when Baldwin was repeatedly and obviously reading his lines from the Teleprompter. There was also his embarrassing shout-out in the first scene (both versions) of being "here in the greatest city on earth, NYC, wazzup!" Years ago, Lily Tomlin appeared on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and she used to have to go round and round over the character of Ernestine and how, if she wasn't using her power as an AT&T operator on big targets, the sting of Ernestine's comedy went soggy. Few have ever protected the character the way Lily did. And it's that emotional honesty and that recognition of the character she plays that allows her, all these years later, to still know Ernestine and Edith Ann and to share them with an audience still overjoyed to see them. It's hard to believe Lily would have 'good-sported' it the way Alec did. He dishonored the character of Jack with that moment.
Along with bad acting, there was bad writing. There were many lines that just weren't funny, for example. Amy Poehler got stuck with a number of those lines but she managed to put them across and still get laughs. Tina Fey was just miserable. An acting career no longer really appears to be in her future so when NBC does finally pull the plug, look for her to fade quickly. At one point, she could have continued on as a writer, but she's exposed just how limited her talents are there as well. With Jack Burdtit, Fey co-wrote the awful live episode(s).
Unable to come up with a decent premise, they cobbled together bad SNL skits. So you had not just flashbacks to things that happened, but lengthy 'flashbacks' that were just parodies of old TV shows.
You got Jon Hamm in Blackface with Tracy doing a parody of Amos & Andy (the TV show featured African-Americans in those roles, it was only for the radio show and the thirties film that White actors played the parts). The whole 'joke' was that in one scene after another (time elapsing between scenes, with Kenneth narrating) that the Black actor beat up the White actor on live TV. Again, there was no Black face on the Amos & Andy TV show. How this revisionary nonsense honors TV or even captures it is anyone's guess? If your point was to establish that fifties TV was racist, there are many ways to do so. But when your 'joke' includes a Black actor attacking a White actor on TV repeatedly, you're really not capturing racism. In fact, you're implying it was non-existent.
NBC was the network of controversy in 1968 when Chrysler was demanding Petula Clark use an alternate take for the broadcast of her special. What offended Chrysler -- and NBC agreed with the corporation, no surprise -- was that while singing with Harry Belafonte, Clark and he had briefly held hands. Belafonte is African-American, Clark is Anglo-White. In other words, that's NBC and, no, they wouldn't have ever aired a show in the 1950s where a Black actor repeatedly attacked a White actor. We're sorry that we have to be sticklers for details and rain on Tina Fey's hi-jinks, but, again, if you're going to decry racism, decry it. Don't toy with it and then ignore it.
Related, in another 'flashback,' a news reporter named Jamie is shouted down on NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report (for context, that's now Nightly News with Brian Williams). Jamie was played by Tina Fey, the news anchors were played (East Coast) by Alec Baldwin and Jon Hamm and by Alec Baldwin and Brian Williams. This was a (thankfully) brief sketch. Chet and David (Baldwin was David in both versions) refuse to believe that the woman (Fey) is reporter Jaimie.
It wasn't funny. And that's not just because the audience in the second broadcast applauded wildly when Brian Williams told Fey, "Look, honey, you have a dynamite shape but you're going to have to shut up and let a man tell us what happened there."
First off, that wasn't the moon landing, Water Cooler Set. You seem confused. But that's because history is factual and factual is beyond your grasp. And, Hampton Stevens, that wasn't "a send-up of NBC's Nightly News in the 1960s." Jamie was trying to report on an explosion on Apollo 13. That's an actual event. It happened April 12, 1970. That wasn't the sixties.
And that 'parody' wasn't NBC. That's what made Brian Williams' participation so awful. There he was in a skit mocking NBC for refusing to realize that women could report on news in 1970. Nancy Dickerson left CBS News for NBC in 1963. She continued there until 1970. Her work included covering MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech and other significant moments such as JFK's funeral: "Behind the casket is Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy. To her right is her brother-in-law, the attorney general, Robert Kennedy. They are helping her down out of that carrier that has just brought down the casket." That clip and more was featured on NPR's Day by Day in 2006 when journalist John Dickerson was on the program to discuss the book he wrote about his mother, On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star. You'd think Brian Williams, anchor and "managing editor" of NBC's evening news would know about the program's history. You'd certainly think he'd know about John Dickerson's book.
It's really hard to see how distorting the factual record is in any way 'honoring' live television.
Other skits included a parody where Alec was apparently supposed to be Dean Martin. Dean Martin was a nice man that no one has anything bad to say about -- not even Jerry Lewis, his former partner. So the notion that they're going to play him as a sloppy drunk?
Seriously? All we can say is, "Golly, Alec, we can't wait till you're dead and the parodists are utilizing those nasty calls you made to your daughter. And maybe they can play you drunk as well? It would certainly explain why you didn't know your own daughter's age in that shrill phone call, right?"
Unlike what aired as 'parody,' Dean Martin would never have reached around or over Dusty Springfield while she was performing on his show. Nor would he have been talking into the camera blocking her as she sang. That was disgusting and calling the character "Joey Montero" just went to the fact that while you're willing to trash, you're too chicken to use the dead man's name.
Then there was The Gruber Brother and Nipsey, a supposed send-up of Laugh-In. Here's a fun-fact, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In revolutionized television and did so with, in the words of co-creator George Schlatter, "a blinding burst of blackouts, sight-gags, sketches and one-liners." It was the first show to really show what film could do. Film. It wasn't live TV.
But there was Kenneth insisting to Liz, "Think about your hero, Rosemary Howard. She wrote for the edgiest live variety show of all time: The Gruber Brother and Nipsy."
It's amazing that none of the Water Cooler Set remembered Rosemary on Friday. In the second season episode "Rosemary's Baby," Liz explains to Pete, as they wait in line for Liz to get Rosemary (Carrie Fisher) to autograph her new book I'm Only Laughing Because It's Funny, "She's the first female writer for Laugh-In. She wrote all the political stuff for Donny & Marie. I grew up watching her."
Then, in that episode, we see Nixon walking into people (on the set of Laugh-In) saying, "Pardon me, pardon me." What is supposed to be Goldie Hawn stops dancing to note, "You were already pardoned."
Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after Laugh-In, but we bring it up for a reason. 30 Rock, in season two, established Rosemary wrote for Laugh-In. She was still doing that when Nixon was pardoned, according to 30 Rock, so the Haldeman as a mail box joke from season two (established to be on Laugh-In) was suddenly flipped to The Gruber Brother and Nipsey?
When you stop caring about the world you've established, you're really not a writer.
And if you claim to be a critic, you need to stop gushing about how live TV was honored and celebrated because no such thing happened. Doing TV skits really isn't about celebrating the golden age of live TV. Getting the facts wrong really isn't about honoring the golden age of live TV. Critics should grasp that.
They should. But how can they when they write ridiculous 'critiques' that include this little gem explaining why they're not worried if their 'quotes' from the show are correct: "Why should I get to rewind to get a quote just right when Tina, Alec, and the rest of the gang don't get to?" Well maybe because you're a TV critic, not a performer on live TV? How's that for starters? Maybe, while exploring that, you can, somewhere in there, try discussing the need for accuracy?
The Water Cooler set is so far up its own ass, they can't see straight. Which is how Hampton Stevens managed to write, "A spoof of The Honeymooners lampooned the sexism in 1950s sitcoms." The Lovebirds featured Tina and Alec. We're not seeing the sexism tackled.
Now in the skit, Alec's character repeatedly resorted to threats of physical violence. You can argue whether The Honeymooners Audrey gave as good as she got when it came to the verbals on that show. But we're having a hard time seeing how that's sexism. If you're afraid that these words will result in actions or that the words will terrorize, then we're talking about violence and we're talking about crime.
What they're not talking about, the Water Cooler Set, is Tina Fey's repeated use of homophobia.
We're not doing links on this, we've called it out repeatedly. In article after article. We avoid the show because, unlike the Water Cooler Set, we can't chuckle at homophobia, we can't even stomach it. The Lovebirds? The East Coast live broadcast had the skit end with the 'joke' of the actress playing the wife exclaiming she was a lesbian who was sleeping with another woman. [On the West Coast, the 'joke' was she confessed to getting a venereal disease from Orson Welles.] Wait, we're not done. The West Coast live broadcast featured a spoof of a 50s commercial for cigarettes that included the following:
Hello, I'm Dr. Harold Spaceman. I'm known in the industry as the gay doctor because I always have a smile on my face because I have so many homosexual lovers. [. . . ] 9 out of 10 doctors surveyed said, "You've got a lot of nerve, Spaceman, calling here after what you tried on my nephew."
So the punchline for one skit is that an actress is gay? How is that funny? Oh, right, it's funny like her "cat rodeo in a gay guy's apartment" 'joke' in previous seasons. A woman being gay might be funny if she'd pretended to have been something else in the skit. Or maybe if some man were coming on to her and they used that as a punchline. But just being gay? When people scream with laughter -- and the East Coast broadcast audience did scream with laughter (please note, both shows were live from the East Coast) -- they got your 'joke' but we're not invested in you, Tina Fey, and we don't have to laugh at your non-stop homophobia.
As for the 50s commercial? Gay is not pedophilia. It would be really great if Tina Fey could stop equating gay men with pedophiles. There was never a reason for her to do that in the first place. You would think, after all these 'jokes,' someone would have corrected her homophobic assumption long ago.
We're considering doing a piece where we ridicule Tina Fey on her small, tiny number of lovers. We figure since she's always making fun of gay men and lesbians for their sexual desires, we ought be making jokes at her expense. We all are aware of her born-again phase, right? Oh, that's right, we're not all aware of that late high school/early college period. But if Tina and NBC want to continue to broadcast that homophobia on the public's airwaves, we're more than happy to write 'material' on that and we'll include when Tina first got fingered.
We don't normally make fun of people's sex lives -- especially sad cases like people in their forties who don't even need a full hand to count their lovers -- but we'll be happy to make an exception for Tina Fey since she finds the sexual desires of gay people to be so funny. Thing is though, if we start writing about the real Tina Fey, her Water Cooler Cred goes right down the toilet. [Tina, as you read this, keep that in mind.]
Both broadcasts played like the worst Saturday Night Live ever. In fact, bringing tired Paul McCartney on to act and not even getting a song out of him sounds like the worst Saturday Night Live ever. Only Jane, Kristen Schaal (Hazel) and Cheyenne Jackson (Danny) managed to be consistently funny, in character and not embarrass themselves. [As with last season's live show(s), Jane sang the East Coast theme and Cheyenne did the West Coast.] In the West Coast version, Bowden looked like an idiot when she was supposed to be Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In and she was making ridiculous sexual faces while dancing. Goldie, pay attention, was sexy on Laugh-In because she wasn't trying to be. How typical on this show that any attempt to recreate a natural moment comes off forced.
Judah Friedlander was on the East Coast episode as Frank. On the West Coast episode, he was onstage at the end during the credits. Otherwise, Fred Armisen played his dialogue-less role for the West Coast version. Grizz Chapman (Grizz) and Kevin Brwon (Dot.Com) were also glorified extras as was Sue Galloway (Sue). With all those skits, you might have thought they could do something with the cast. But instead, you had Jimmy Fallon playing a younger Jack, you had Jon Hamm playing two roles, you had Donald Glover as a young Tracy Jordan and you had way too much Tracy Morgan and Tina Fey.
Live television is sacred, Kenneth The Former Page insists, and some idiots took that as the message of a half-assed live broadcast. Live TV and the sitcom? That's the story of a woman so the Water Cooler Set and Tina Fey will never get it right.
Live TV fell out of favor for sitcoms for a number of reasons, chiefly that the shows that were taped from the fifties did great in syndication and I Love Lucy lives on to this day while Your Show of Shows and others were live and they survived in kinescopes. [The Museum of Broadcast Communications: "The first and most primitive method of recording television programs, production, or news story, a kinescope is a film made of a live television broadcast. Kinescopes are usually created by placing a motion picture camera in front of a television monitor and recording the image off the monitor's screen while the program is being aired. This recording method came into wide use around 1947. Before videotape, this process was the standard industry method of creating a permanent document, for rebroadcast and for archival purposes."] In last week's 30 Rock(s), Jack tried to insist that doing the shows on tape would be cheaper. No. It's actually cheaper to do a sitcom live. And doing it live Thursday meant the cast and crew had Friday off -- something that doesn't happen when they tape.
Live TV for sitcoms ended (and ended quickly) because of syndication -- specifically because of the money to be made in syndication. Once it ended, that was really it for decades.
It was NBC that brought it back to sitcoms or, rather, that carried the program that did. This is a story of someone with strong comic timing and great skill. However, it's a woman so you know that means it's a story that's rarely told. We warned you throughout the 00s that the sitcom wasn't dead and that this nonsense had been paraded before in the first half of the 80s. At that point, there were few sitcoms on TV and few that got any kind of an audience. One that did was Gimmie A Break! which starred Tony and Emmy Award winner Nell Carter.
NBC suits realized she was a star when she was stuck in a supporting role on the network's The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. She managed to shine in that and went on to shine, from 1981 to 1987, as Nell Harper on Gimmie a Break! -- earning Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Nell's story is not any different from most women in sitcoms. Like Roseanne and Cybil and so many others, everybody 'knew' better than the actress playing the lead. Coleman Mitchell and Geoffrey Neigher 'knew' what was funny. Often what they found 'funny,' Nell found sexist and racist. She did not appreciate being given lines to make Nell Harper come off dumb or unintelligent. She refused to say those lines. She also didn't understand why Nell was the only Black character in the whole town. This was among the reasons the actress started using cocaine heavily. She fought and resisted efforts to play women, and especially African-American women, as stupid. She was right and she won in the end but don't for a minute think that it was easy for her.
Telma Hopkins would join the cast (after Mitchell and Nigher were gone) as Addy Wilson. And from her first episode, where Addy and Nell clashed and then made up, it was obvious that Nell Carter and Telma Hopkins had that rare form of chemistry that Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance first brought to a large TV audience. In one episode, Nell is upset that Addy's going to Hawaii without her.
Nell: Look, I really want you to go to Hawaii. And I want you to have a good time. I want you to enjoy that beautiful room that we picked out together. You know, the one with that beautiful view of the ocean. I want you to have that view so you can get a good look at that tidal wave that I'm hoping will hit that hotel, knocking a palm tree against the door, trapping you in just before that volcano erupts blowing hot lava all over your open-toed shoes.
That's from "Cat Story" (written by Tom Biener, Mort Lachman, Ron Landry and Sy Rosen) which aired February 23, 1985 and which was the first live broadcast of a sitcom in decades. Nell knew the move would attract attention to the show, she was proud of the work everyone was doing and glad that the changes she wanted had been incorporated into the show. The show was on a winning streak (one that would continue through the end of season five) and she'd been doing interviews non-stop for months. NBC was iffy on the prospect of a live show. What if something went wrong, what if someone forgot a line, what if someone froze, what if, what if, what if.
Nell pointed out that she was a Broadway actress, she was used to live audiences and she'd just, the year before, put together a cabaret act that went over well. She didn't see anyone having problems -- certainly not Telma who was use to live audiences from her time in Tony Orlando & Dawn and Dolph Sweet was not only a Broadway veteran, he'd also done live television. NBC needed to 'think about' the proposal. Three months later, they were tentatively for it, but they wanted a simple show in terms of production. The scenes of "Cat Story" all take place in either the Kanisky kitchen or living room.
It was a funny episode, it was a strong episode, it drew new attention to the show and, more importantly, let more people know that 'look at the funny talking Black maid' wasn't what Gimmie A Break! was about.
It was a triumph.
Nothing about 30 Rock on Thursday could qualify as a triumph.
About the only thing Tina Fey shares with the late Nell Carter is NBC.
No, 30 Rock last week was more like ABC's The Drew Carey Show which also used live shows for stunt ratings. (Though successful by 30 Rock standards, it should be noted Tina's ratings on Thursday were like The Drew Carey Show's . . . when ABC decided to burn off new season eight and nine episodes over the summers of 2003 and 2004.) On Carey's show the live episodes had no coherent story and the actors mugged, broke character and interacted with the audience.
Drew Carey had a funny show. It was often a very good show. It was never a critical darling. For example, over nine seasons, the program received only 7 Emmy nominations and no wins. Those nominations were never for writing and the only acting nomination was Charles Nelson Reilly for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. By contrast, 30 Rock received 15 nominations . . . just last year.
Here's another difference between the overly praised and petted 30 Rock and the actually funny Drew Carey Show. When Drew's ratings tanked (early in season eight), ABC was stuck with the show because of a contract they'd signed in 2000 guaranteeing the show would air nine seasons. NBC has no such contract with 30 Rock. In a medium where ratings are supposed to determine whether you live or die, NBC has repeatedly brought this increasingly bad program back. While the renewal of shows such as Whitney and Community -- both of which get better ratings than 30 Rock -- are in doubt, 30 Rock always gets a smooth ride. Of course, if either or both of the shows get the axe and the chronically low-rated 30 Rock returns for season seven, expect even more viewers to flee.
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