Although 30 Rock has now been off the air for nine years, the series has had a second life on different streaming platforms. Similar to other hit NBC comedies like The Office and Parks and Recreation, the show was available on Netflix for several years, and now exists primarily on NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming platform. The show has been so successful on streaming, in fact, that Peacock released an exclusive reunion special in 2020. Spanning seven seasons and 139 episodes, the original series is a special time capsule of the late aughts and early 2010s, featuring a cast of now iconic characters and legendary guest stars. A perfectly assembled cast of characters married with smart writing and a genius conceit helped establish the show as one of the best workplace comedies of all time.
One thing the show always knocked out of the park was the annual Christmas special. Coming from dysfunctional families, Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) were perennially tortured by the holiday season, and it always made for great television. For reasons unknown – potentially just to mix things up – the writing team opted against Christmas episodes for the first and 6th seasons. But in every other season, these special winter holiday episodes were always a treat. Let’s take a look at all the 30 Rock Christmas episodes, ranked from worst to best.
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5 Christmas Attack Zone
NBC
The bottom of the list comes from season five of the show, an episode that features great guest performances from Jack Donaghy’s parents, Colleen (Elaine Stritch) and Milton (Alan Alda). In the context of the season, Jack has just discovered that his real father is Milton Greene, a hippie professor at Vermont’s Bennington College. Milton’s liberal nature is of course a sore spot for Jack, leading to some great lines like: “In what kind of emergency would you be necessary? If someone wanted to know if the ’60s were awesome or not?” Jack decides to bring Milton to his mother’s Christmas dinner to ambush her. Meanwhile, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) attempts to rebrand himself as a serious actor.
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As he tells NBC Page Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer), “The only movies Tracy Jordan makes are about the holocaust, Georgia O’Keefe, or both.” In the midst of all this other drama, Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) struggles with her recent separation from her eccentric partner Paul L’Astname (Will Forte). The episode is solid overall, but unfortunately features a controversial joke that led to it being removed from Peacock.
4 LudaChristmas
NBCUniversal
Season two’s Christmas episode is unique in that it’s the only one on this list to feature appearances by Liz’s family, her mother Margaret (Anita Gillette), father Dick (Buck Henry), and brother Mitch (Andy Richter). Liz’s parents are sweet, normal folks on the surface, but Jack’s mother, Colleen, insists on exposing the underlying tensions by the end of the episode. Liz’s brother Mitch got in a skiing accident when he was 17 and suffered severe head trauma, so he’s stuck in a groundhog day situation where he relives the day before the accident over and over. In Mitch’s head, Ronald Reagan is still president, prompting Jack to say: “you lucky bastard.”
Meanwhile, Kenneth hands out Christmas presents to the ungrateful writers, who throw them in the trash. Enraged by their behavior. Kenneth locks them in their office and forces them to watch footage from a mission trip to Guatemala to show them some perspective. They feel so guilty that they try to chop down the massive Christmas tree on the plaza. Meanwhile, Colleen finally succeeds in unearthing some family trauma that causes the entire Lemon family to fight. Jack smiles as the carnage ensues, and we see Jenna perform a beautiful rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
3 Secret Santa
Season four’s holiday special features an iconic cameo by legendary actress Julianne Moore, playing Jack’s high school sweetheart Nancy Donovan, who resurfaces after Jack makes a social media profile. Jack and Liz decide to exchange gifts for the first time, throwing Lemon into a tailspin. Meanwhile, Kenneth tries to organize a complicated secret santa game. To avoid playing the game, the writers invent a fake religion called Verdukianism. At the same time, a struggle ensues between Jenna and the show’s newest cast member Danny (Cheyenne Jackson).
The show’s director, Pete Hornberger, is upset because Jenna never contributes money to his annual gift to the building’s cleaning ladies, so he suggests that Danny duet the show’s Christmas song this year, knowing full well that it will enrage Jenna. Before long, Tracy ends up exposing the phony nature of Verdukianism, and all organized religion, to Kenneth. In this exchange, Tracy delivers a great line:” “Why don’t Catholics eat meat on Fridays? I’ll tell you why; because the Pope owns Long John Silver’s.” One of the things that makes the show so special is just how frequently jokes like these pop up. 30 Rock has more jokes per minute than arguably any sitcom ever.
Throughout the episode, Jack and Nancy reminisce and flirt, despite Nancy having a family. They first decide not to kiss, to play things safe, and Nancy takes the train back to Boston. But then at the end of the episode, Nancy returns and decides to kiss Jack after her train was cancelled due to a bomb threat. Jack learns in the final moments that calling in this bomb threat was Liz’s gift, blowing his mind. The bomb threat gets traced back to the writers’ room phone, so the writers all get arrested, which restores Kenneth’s faith in God. Then Pete’s plan to mess with Jenna is foiled in an intimate moment between Jenna and Danny, when she reveals that singing Christmas songs was always her escape from trauma throughout childhood. Danny’s solution is to do the duet with Jenna at the end of the episode, but he purposefully sings poorly to make her look better.
2 My Whole Life Is Thunder
The final Christmas special of the series is a phenomenal one, featuring guest spots from Colleen and Jenna’s boyfriend Paul (Will Forte). Liz has just secretly married her lover Criss (James Marsden), sending Jenna into a jealous rage. Adding insult to injury, Liz wins the “80 Under 80” award from the Women in Media organization. Jenna is enraged: “First you get married, now you’re winning an award? These are my things. Next, you’ll tell me Mickey Rourke catapulted you into the Hollywood Sign.”
Meanwhile, Colleen flies into town seemingly to torture Jack for the holiday. But something is different about her this time: she’s in poor health and seems softer. Jack keeps trying to avoid Colleen, but she has a knack of pulling him away at the worst times. To heighten this joke, a woman approaches Jack and delivers this insane line: “I’m a nymphomaniac virgin widow and I just finished my year of mourning. I’ve got a hotel room and a latex allergy, and I’m just wondering if you’re doing anything for the next 12 to 14 hours.”
At the reception for Liz’s award, Jenna tries to sabotage it by turning it into a wedding between her and Paul, but it fails. Back in Jack’s world, we see him take a nice carriage ride with Colleen. In perhaps her only vulnerable moment ever, she tells Jack “I just want you to be happy.” And then she dies of a heart attack.
In an act of tenderness, Jack delivers the “best eulogy of all time” at her funeral, featuring an actual cameo from Kermit the Frog and a flute rendition of “Danny Boy.” At the very end, one of the church’s statues comes to life, and it’s actually Paul in disguise. Jenna and Paul get married at Colleen’s funeral, and Paul takes both Jenna’s first and last names. Jenna’s vows are truly something else: “I promise to pour antibiotics all over your penis before you staple it to anything.”
1 Christmas Special
Season three’s “Christmas Special” isn’t just the best Christmas episode; it’s one of the best 30 Rock episodes period. In the beginning, Liz introduces a charity called Letters to Santa to the writers, where poor kids from the area tell Santa what they want for Christmas and benevolent donors fulfill their requests. Feeling disconnected from her family after the blowup in season 2, she overcompensates and buys these kids everything they want. Meanwhile, Jack explains that Colleen ruined Christmas every year by inviting a different strange man over to the house, with whom Jack would have to watch her flirt all night. This year, Jack flies down to Florida to visit his mother so that she won’t come to New York for Christmas.
In so doing, he accidentally hits her with his car, breaking her hip. He secretly waits eight minutes to call the ambulance, perhaps hoping she’ll die. The plan backfires and Colleen flies to New York so that Jack can take care of her. Jack is so suffocated at home that he forces the writers and producers to put up a last minute Christmas special just so he can stay at work all day.
Liz delivers her armload of presents to the poor kids’ apartment, but two men appear instead of the kids and unceremoniously snatch the presents. Tracy suggests that Liz got scammed, sending her into a fit of rage. She tries to report it to the post office, who accepts the letters to Santa, but they won’t hear it. Liz asks Jack if he knows the postmaster, and he explains that they had a falling out over the Jerry Garcia stamp, leading to Jack’s best joke of the episode: “If I wanna lick a hippie I’ll just return Joan Baez’s phone calls.” She returns to the kids’ apartment and finally meets them, taking credit for the presents. By this admission, the kids discover that Santa isn’t real, enraging the two rude men, who were actually the kids’ parents all along.
Eventually, Colleen puts the pieces together and realizes that Jack waited eight minutes to call the ambulance, and a fight ensues. Jack tries to re-litigate his childhood Christmas trauma, but learns that his mother actually always invited those strange men over because she was sleeping with them, so they’d buy Jack Christmas presents. The episode ends with a tender moment of the two of them sitting at the piano singing “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.”
