The Good
A hilarious show that doesn’t shine a light on the fact that it is funny.
The Bad
I wish the packaging had been of the digipack variety.
Tina Fey has basically put her life on the television screen with 30 Rock: Season 1. She stars in this show as Liz Lemon and runs the writing room for a very Saturday Night Live-type show. However, she has her world upended when Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) is brought on board to help make her show “better.” Aside from seeming to have little knowledge about the show or even caring about what the show is doing, Donaghy only wants the audience to laugh so he forces Liz to take on Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan; see that art imitating life imitating art again?). The only problem is that Jordan has his own ideas about the show, so now Liz has to juggle all these personalities not to mention all the other personalities that go into pulling a show like this off.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Tina Fey is a comic revelation on this show. I had always thought she was funny in the News segment on Saturday Night Live but she is really amazing here. There are a lot of funny characters she has to work off of such Janke Krakowski as Jenna Maroney, Lonny Ross as Josh Girard and Scott Adsit as Pete Hornberger among others. 30 Rock: Season 1 showcases drama humor done right.
Features
There are a few of these commentary tracks on this three disc set but the one I chose to listen to was “Tracy Does Conan.” Tracy Morgan does the honors all by himself here as he talks about first meeting Tina Fey on SNL and how even then she always wrote really funny stuff for him. Morgan then talks about how his character is based on the outrageousness of show business and how he was on board with this show from day one. Truthfully, having interviewed Morgan here for Are We There Yet?, I can say that his character on the show and who he is in real life don’t seem that much different.
Behind the Scenes Featurettes
Deleted Scenes
There are 9 deleted scenes and they have titles like “C-Word” and “Up All Night.” There really isn’t too much to say about these scenes other than they are of really good quality and actually quite funny. While I am sure that the editors of this show had their reasons for wanting to trim things up, the stuff that was excised is really good and it was probably very difficult to make the excisions.
Wrap Party Video Including Bloopers
An Evening with Kenneth Shorts and Makin’ It Happen Shorts
I grouped these together only because they are both very similar. The featurette An Evening with Kenneth Shorts give us 6 shorts with Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) that are shot on video. He tells jokes (none of which I really found funny) although I did find it interesting when these segments devolved into fart contests. The Makin’ It Happen Shorts were very quick shows in which characters interacted in a mundane way and then the show would abruptly end with a tagline. In all honesty, unless you are very big fan of this show you really have no need to check them out.
Video
Anamorphic Widescreen - 1.78:1. This show with its non-linear back and forth style is what, I think, keeps viewers constantly engaged. Things don’t move so fast however that it is hard to keep up. The compression on this show was very solid over all three discs. I liked that things don’t look so clean that they feel dyspeptic. This show feels real both because of it’s shaky camera, cinema verite feel and because the characters don’t look like they have been touched up a million times in between takes.
Audio
English Dolby Digital 5.1. Subtitled in English. This show sounded solid. There wasn’t anything about the way things were recorded that really sounded that great, but nothing grabbed my attention negatively either. I was just happy to see the characters on this show talking in normal tones. They didn’t whisper their lines, there wasn’t any melodrama, it all just sort of presented itself as very real. The audio seemed to be captured as is and this just added to that motif.
Package
Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, and Alec Baldwin stand on the front cover of this slipcase with 30 Rockefeller Plaza behind them. They have given all the images on this front cover an almost silvery feel. The back of this cover has a bunch of shots from this show, a description of what 30 Rock: Season 1 is about, a Bonus Features listing and some technical specs. All three discs pull out in one piece of artwork which continues to showcase the characters on this show. There is also a section that lists out all the episodes for each disc but sadly doesn’t say where any of the Bonus Features are. I really wish that Universal Home Video would get into the digipack game.
Final Word
What is it that everyone things is so great about Jack McBrayer?
It could because his annoying smile really grates on my nerves, or seeing his picture close up in Entertainment Weekly left a bad impression, but I watched this show and I waited for him to be funny and it never happened. He would come on in his immaculately tailored suit, I would be thinking he was going to unload some comedy gold and it never even came close to happening. He would make faces, or go over the top and all I kept wondering to myself was, “Is this supposed to be funny?” Sadly, it never was to me but that didn’t really cloud my impression of this show too much. I found that there were enough laughs, enough relatable gags and jokes that this whole thing worked well.
I think what really struck me was how much Tina Fey put of herself into this show. Like Chris Rock said about Woody Allen, the best comics are the ones who put everything about themselves into their act. Tina Fey has dropped herself and other comics into this world, and even though it might be cool for them to play against type, I didn’t feel that 30 Rock went out of it’s way to do this like a show such as Extras does.
30 Rock: Season 1 is a must see for all who like their shows funny and intelligent.
30 Rock was released .
