30 Rock

Tina Fey's NBC sitcom ran from 2006 to 2013, loosely based on her years as head writer at SNL. She plays Liz Lemon, showrunner of a flailing sketch comedy called TGS, trying to keep her writers' room functional while a new corporate boss descends from the thirtieth floor. That boss is Jack Donaghy, played by Alec Baldwin, a Reagan-worshipping GE executive assigned to fix the show. Tracy Morgan plays Tracy Jordan, the volatile movie star Jack installs in the cast. Jane Krakowski plays Jenna Maroney, the needy diva who was there first. Jack McBrayer is Kenneth the page. The pilot sets up the premise and gets out of the way; by episode three the engine is running.

The joke density. Fey's room was writing seven to nine jokes a minute, cutaways and sight gags and background signs stacked on top of the dialogue, and the show rewards rewatches because you miss half of them the first time. Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy is the best sitcom performance of its decade — he reads lines about microwave divisions and submarine sandwiches like Shakespearean soliloquies, and the Jack-and-Liz scenes in his office are the show's spine. Tracy Morgan was allowed to improvise around a scaffolding of absurdity that fits him like nothing else ever has. The writers' room — Robert Carlock, Donald Glover, John Riggi, Kay Cannon — built a universe where corporate satire, showbiz satire, and pure cartoon logic coexist without picking a lane. The guest stars don't phone it in. Will Arnett, Dean Winters, Elaine Stritch, and Chris Parnell all show up with real roles, not cameos.

It's a cold show. Fey writes Liz Lemon as a mess, which is honest, but the series doesn't hand you anyone to root for the way Parks and Rec does with Leslie Knope. The pacing is relentless to the point of exhaustion; if you're not laughing you're drowning. Season one is rougher than people remember, and a few recurring bits (Dennis Duffy, some of Jenna's romantic storylines) wear thin. The live episodes are a gimmick that mostly doesn't pay off. And the show's product-placement jokes about product placement eventually stopped being jokes.

Anyone who loved Arrested Development's density, Veep's cruelty, or Community's willingness to be weird on purpose. If you need warm hugs from your sitcoms, this isn't that — go to Parks and Rec or Ted Lasso. If you bounce off cutaway gags, you'll bounce hard. If you came up on SNL and want to see what the smartest person in that building did when she got her own show, you're in the right place.

WORTH IT because the writing is doing more work per minute than almost any sitcom ever made, and Baldwin's performance alone would carry a lesser show. 30 Rock has opinions about corporate media, celebrity, and feminism, and it holds them tightly, but it delivers them inside jokes and inside Jack Donaghy monologues rather than through speeches. Nobody stops the scene to be agreed with. That's the difference between a show with a worldview and a show lecturing you about one. It's earned, not announced.