This article is part of 20 years of 30 RockSlate’s celebration of the iconic sitcom two decades after its premiere.
Not long ago it seemed like 30 RockThe goose was cooked. Tina Fey spent the years after her sitcom ended its run on NBC in 2013 embroiled in a series of controversies, ranging from her prickly dismissal of critics who took issue with the casting of Jane Krakowski as a Native American in her follow-up series. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to the widespread reaction against an instantly infamous phenomenon Saturday evening live where she suggested that Americans assuage their fears about the rise of white supremacists by stuffing their faces with cake. In 2020, a month after the murder of George Floyd, she and Fey 30 Rock Co-creator Robert Carlock has asked streaming services to remove four episodes from digital platforms that included scenes of white actors wearing blackface makeup, a departure from her previous statement that she was “retreating” from “the culture of demanding an apology.” “I now understand that the intent is not a free pass for white people to use these images,” Fey wrote. “I apologize for the pain they have caused. In the future, no comedy-loving child need come across these tropes and be stung by their ugliness.” But her apology failed to stem the rising tide of criticism, or counter the sense that Fey, once an icon of liberal white feminism, had become irreparably problematic, or at least permanently tainted. Fey’s admission of guilt prompted calls for her to be stripped of the career-spanning Mark Twain Prize, and by 2021, even the author of The book of 30 rocks argued that the show’s “troubling” treatment of race was a permanent stain on its reputation, if not necessarily fatal.
Fast forward to fall 2026, when Fey is the star and co-creator of a hit Netflix series and 30 Rock ranked eighth in the New York Times canon poll of 21st the 100 best shows of the century. It was only 10 years ago that BuzzFeed haughtily informed us that it was “time to stop apologizing for Tina Fey.” Now I feel like there’s nothing to apologize for.
30 Rock endures because of the density and intelligence of his writing, and a deep commitment to the absurdity that lies outside time.
What has changed? On the one hand, the decision of Fey and Carlock to end the offensive 30 Rock the episodes seem to have worked; In the age of post-physical media, what isn’t streamed might as well not exist. The aggressive post-Elon Or maybe we love Tina Fey too much to let her go.
30 Rock has not experienced a streaming-era renaissance on the order of The office Or Friendsperhaps because it does not offer the soothing pleasures of the comfort watch. But, 20 years after its premiere, it endures in other ways, in turns of phrase that have become part of the everyday lexicon (“I want to go”) and in the intelligent irreverence of shows like HBO’s. The other two who share his deadly allergy to sentimentality. (Fey and Carlock share a deep Generation X revulsion toward even the slightest whiff of sincerity.) Like The Simpsons, 30 Rock endures because of the density and intelligence of his writing, as well as a deep commitment to absurdity that lies outside of time. The show is often considered a satire (a word invoked in the Times Top 100 list), and it is true that Fey and Co. frequently veer into network television culture, parodying the real-life acquisition of their parent company by Comcast by having the NBC channel acquired by an unglamorous conglomerate named Kabletown. But the show’s prescience also works against it in some ways; it’s less funny to talk about a fictitious competition entitled MILF Island when real life has since followed suit. What shines now are the moments when 30 Rock sticks entirely to reality, entering a realm of pure ridiculousness where only the boldest and stupidest TV shows dare to venture. A knack for floating gags is one of the reasons the show creates such immortal bait; you don’t need to remember why Steve Buscemi pretends to be a high school student to throw a fast How are you, my friends?
Fey and Carlock and 30 Rock‘s writers took plenty of opportunities to bite the hand that fed them over their seven seasons, but the show’s attacks on the network’s ignorance of prosecutions, personified by Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, tended to be at least affectionate, or at least tinged with the understanding that, as a prime-time sitcom with mediocre ratings, they were in no position to seize the moral high ground. In the second season, Fey’s Liz Lemon, an idealistic comedy showrunner who sometimes changes her principles to keep her show on the air, meets a legendary television writer, Rosemary (Carrie Fisher), whom she has idolized since childhood. Liz is briefly inspired to follow in her hero’s footsteps and stand up to the Man – the Man being Jack, an Ivy League titan imbued with the arrogance of Fey’s former self. SNL boss Lorne Michaels – but in doing so gets her fired, she realizes that Rosemary’s anti-establishment sensibilities have only made her unemployable – and that the countercultural satire for which she was famous in the 1960s has become incomprehensible over time. (“Don’t you understand?” Rosemary asks after replaying a particularly inscrutable gag. “The mailbox was Haldeman!”) It doesn’t take long for Liz to abandon her principles and beg for work, saving her conscience by pledging to send her washed-up model a few hundred dollars a month.
Some of 30 RockReference points have grown further apart over the decades, like the phone-throwing incident that inspired the Season 5 joke about Russell Crowe offering a benefit to the victims of his own mood swings. But its chaotic surrealism has aged like wine. Some critics took issue with the show’s increasingly cartoonish characterizations over time, which caused Liz to go from a middle-aged woman struggling to balance her career and romantic life to an unkempt wreck of a person who, at one point, reveals that she wears a Duane Reade bag as underwear. But Fey relished the opportunity to be ridiculous, such as in the series-ending episode where Liz gets so sick she sneezes gray matter, looking worriedly at a used tissue while saying, “I hope that’s not a major part of my fuzziness.”
Fey also saw the opportunity to build a show around a female protagonist who, for once, was the opposite of aspirational. Liz was not an anti-hero like the brooding male protagonists of so many contemporary TV series, just a well-meaning idealist whose principles often led her in precisely the wrong direction. In the first season, she discovers that Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), the black movie star who bounced back badly on television after a very public crisis, isn’t reading her lines on TV. TGS cue cards, and she comes to the conclusion that it must be because he can’t read at all. Her white liberal concern comes in so quickly that it overwhelms the underlying racism of her assumption, and rather than invoke it, Tracy decides to turn it to her advantage, while fueling Liz’s belief that she’s doing the right thing. “Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” he sings, “thanks to a very special white lady!” (As the series progresses, it is gradually established that Tracy has large pockets of ignorance, not because of his deprived childhood but because he lives in the bubble created by his insane wealth.)
Tracy forgives Liz for her gentle bigotry, in part because he gets caught exploiting her to skip rehearsals, but the show, at least, doesn’t forget it. Especially at the beginning of 30 RockOn the race, the topic of race comes up almost every week and Liz is almost always on the wrong side of the argument. She has been explicitly called out for racism multiple times, either by another character or by herself, perhaps with more regularity than any prime-time protagonist since Archie Bunker. And although she always admits her fault and promises to do better, she rarely does. Weighing at the end of 30 RockTa-Nehisi Coates praised the series for handling race better than any mainstream show, not for imagining a more harmonious future, but because it never stopped “interrogating whiteness.”
Sitcom characters rarely undergo profound changes, because they disrupt the fragile balance that constitutes a classic whole. But on 30 Rock this constancy takes on a deeper meaning. Its central characters are all narcissistic monsters of one kind: self-righteous (Liz), vain (Jenna), self-aggrandizing (Tracy), Republican (Jack). And if anything, they get worse, not better, as the series goes on, at least until its endgame begrudgingly allows for a hint of personal growth. It’s not that they don’t strive to become better people. But their flaws, along with the rules of television, continue to hold them back.
Everything, that is to say…
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