30 Rock, DVD TV T4475
I love Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin as much as the next bleeding-heart liberal, but I have a special place in my heart for Liz Lemon, the character she plays on 30 Rock. My girl LL is the head writer of a sketch comedy show at NBC. She’s got a great job, but she spends a lot of time wrangling with her lead actors, prone to awful schemes and outlandish vanity, and dealing with Jack Donaghy the network executive, who’s brought in when GE buys NBC at the beginning of the series.
30 Rock has this style of humour that comes at you from left field a lot of the time – ridiculous smash cuts, unexpected sentence endings, and a solid amount of disregard for the fourth wall. Every character has a laundry list of idiosyncrasies, especially Liz. I have a suspicion that everyone who watches 30 Rock laughs at her not because she is so flawed, but because she reminds them so much of themselves. But at the same time as there are gags flying at you from all angles, the show manages to keep a certain amount of storyline and continuity going from episode to episode – Jack’s struggle to maintain two relationships, Liz’s choice between moving to Cleveland and staying in New York, the search for a new cast member.
30 Rock and Tina Fey herself have earned a lot of props for putting this character out there who is arguably a more recognizable, relatable woman than you usually see on TV – she has lame dates, she can’t stick to a workout routine, she acts weird at parties, she has terrible dance moves. She is also in charge of an entire writing team and works 70-hour weeks. A considerable amount of Liz’s storylines deal with her effort to balance her life and her job, or, in 30 Rcck parlance, to “have it all!” (with echoes of encouraging magazine articles for “working moms”). Personally I’m not sure that I agree with the idea that Liz Lemon is some kind of groundbreaking feminist icon, but that’s for another blog post. She and the rest of the characters are, though, charmingly different from a lot of your standard TV archetypes (they are also very, very funny).
Posted by Kayleigh, Desk Staff
