A new 30 Rock thread because I can't find the old one

This is a lot of retrospective rationalizing about why they don't think the show is funny anymore (that's my guess, TLDR).

cerie's funny. it's like pointing at the straight man in a routine and being all why is that guy even there he's totally boring. so much of the schlumpy liz lemon persona is predicated/illustrated on people drooling over cerie instead.

what is the liz lemony schlump persona predicated on?

my antisocial gravitation towards ilx; it's like my k-date, the personals section of the kraft foods website.

Also probably Tina Fey's pre-SNL years as a (slightly) more schlumpy improv comedian. She has mentioned how she deliberately changed her image once she came to NY to be more glamorous/conventially better looking. I do wonder how different the show would be now if Dratch was able to stay on vs. Krakowski. This video was linked in the comments to that post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvOUoYZhoU

Dratch is a terrible actor, ergo the show wouldn't be anywhere near as good.

"Everyone around here is slender or Asian; I'm going to have to become more slender and/or Asian to fit in."

see, there's that Liz Lemon racial insensitivity for yas

wow short hair REALLY not a good look for her

WS Liz Lemon

lol the ducking--->swan transformation s for all time here

it was pretty bad that I was watching the first few secons of the video going "wow, she used to look and sound a lot like Rachel Dratch... OH WAIT A SECOND"

yeah me too!

she makes a terrible stripper in that clip fwiw

lol "Longhair" Adsit/Hornberger in video.

"this woman was a mouseketeer mam!"

from Tina Fey's interview in the current issue of Esquire: "The best doughnut? That's Peter Pan doughnuts in Brooklyn. It's a Polish bakery. We shot nearby once for 30 Rock. It's a white-cream-filled powdered doughnut. And I really believe, when I first tried it, if I had a penis, I would put it in this doughnut."

I bet she could've borrowed one

they have really good donuts, by the way

i love Peter Pan and love how old-school it is, especially the counter like all the old donut joints in NY used to have...but I have to say Donut Plant is where it's at.

Are you an ass-scientist? Because your ass blah blah blah you get the point.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/tina_fey/index.html?story=/mwt/broadsheet/2010/04/14/tina_fey_backlash

this article otm so far

Linking to Doyle's piece on Twitter, the feminist writer Amanda Marcotte added the disturbing ad feminam suggestion, "When I hear a married woman rant about the evils of sluts out there, I tend to wonder who her husband's been dicking."

uh

it must suck being a successful/talented woman, having all these feminists hating on you

"she cast longtime collaborator Rachel Dratch as Jenna Maroney and then had to replace her with buxom blond Jane Krakowski."

I <3 u j krak but buxom is pushing it. leggy, otoh...

good article

also major lols/headscratching that so many writers seem to think that a) TF has written ALL of EVERYTHING she has ever been in or that b) she has more than 50-60% say in what sketches she does and doesn't do on a sketch comedy show (with 20+ writers of various genders, upbringings, sexualities, philosophies and degrees of political acumen...)

for every fucking thing wrong with studio 60, the one killer thing that got me was when he fired the whole staff and wrote a 2 hr sketch comedy show alone every week. hi dere aaron sorkin, realism isnt a case of fukkin magnets, how do they work

dratch isn't funny (at least in ne thing i've seen her in). jenna kills it.

^^yeah this sort of ignores the feminist angle or whatever but is a crucial point

dratch not being funny is a feminist angle???

the fact that feminists can't wrap their heads around someone being conventionally good looking and v v good @ what they do is annoying to them

uh oh

those feminists, always unable to wrap their heads around someone being conventionally good looking and v v good @ what they do

Jerry: Oh good. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about Dr. Whatley. I have a suspicion that he's converted to Judaism just for the jokes.

Father: And this offends you as a Jewish person.

Jerry: No, it offends me as a comedian. And it'll interest you that he's also telling Catholic jokes.

Rachel Dratch as Jenna Maroney and then had to replace her with buxom blond Jane Krakowski.

Ha! All this time I've been thinking Dratch was supposed to play the Fey part. Me and my stereotyping.

So, is there ever going to be another episode of this or what?

returns next week

"she cast longtime collaborator Rachel Dratch as Jenna Maroney and then had to replace her with buxom blond Jane Krakowski."

krakowski is so much funnier than dratch

for every fucking thing wrong with studio 60, the one killer thing that got me was when he fired the whole staff and wrote a 2 hr sketch comedy show alone every week. hi dere aaron sorkin, realism isnt a case of fukkin magnets, how do they work

LOL awesome

"she cast longtime collaborator Rachel Dratch as Jenna Maroney and then had to replace her with buxom blond Jane Krakowski."

krakowski is so much funnier than dratch

Agreed, it was absolutely necessary. I don't know if any on this thread have seen the unaired pilot, but Dratch is clearly out of place as Jenna. Krakowski is one of the top elements of the show.

"the only smart, capable woman in a field of slutty, slobby, neurotic [female] morons,"

um this is totally wrong/inaccurate

Donaghy's last two girlfriends, for ex. are smart, capable women (in both cases a bit smarter and more capable than Jack himself)

Doyle mentions Donaghy's girlfriends but dismisses them for being on the show too briefly:

There is Jenna, of course, whose plotlines typically center around how vapid, unstable, narcissistic, and foolishly ambitious she is; there is Cerie (or, there was Cerie, before the character got put on the Josh Track and stopped really showing up in any episodes at all), Liz’s assistant, whose main role was to use her extremely beautiful body as a means to set up punchlines, those punchlines usually consisting of men getting turned on by her extremely beautiful body, and whose few character moments indicated that she was shallow, oversexed, and profoundly stupid; there are the high-profile female guest stars who play Jack’s love interests every season, who are usually pretty sharp and tough and interesting (Edie Falco, as the liberal senator against whale torture who was turned on by the degradation of sleeping with uber-Republican Jack, being a particular favorite) but always disappear after a few episodes because they are famous; there is Jack’s mother, always a delight, but a rare delight; there is “Girl Writer,” who had fewer lines than even Josh, to the extent of only having a speaking part in one episode. And the episode culminated with a joke about Girl Writer being date raped.

since the show is largely about a "woman making it in a man's world" it seems odd to complain that the world she's making it in is primarily populated with... men (all of whom are also shallow, narcissistic, idiots btw. this is a COMEDY) Dismissing the g/fs and Jack's mom as not being central characters is some weak sauce. Looking for paragons of virtue in a comedy is totally fucking stupid, I'm sorry. All the characters, in order to be funny, are, on some level, required to be silly, overblown caricatures with conventionally unattractive traits. that is how comedy works.

you can't populate a comedy entirely with "straight" roles knowhutimean

Female writer is the third female writer though, after Liz and Sue, so f this. Also this season Cerie joeks have moved away from 'lol attractive female' to 'lol she can teach old ppl to use facebook'.

altho I admit a fascination with how much "feminism" seems to routinely involve women sniping at each other a la the Judean People's Front vs. the People's Front of Judea

"Girl Writer" has a name: Laroche Vanderhoot.

altho I admit a fascination with how much "feminism" seems to routinely involve women sniping at each other a la the Judean People's Front vs. the People's Front of Judea

so OTM

since the show is largely about a "woman making it in a man's world" it seems odd to complain that the world she's making it in is primarily populated with... men (all of whom are also shallow, narcissistic, idiots btw. this is a COMEDY) Dismissing the g/fs and Jack's mom as not being central characters is some weak sauce. Looking for paragons of virtue in a comedy is totally fucking stupid, I'm sorry. All the characters, in order to be funny, are, on some level, required to be silly, overblown caricatures with conventionally unattractive traits. that is how comedy works.

i know right i mean it is not like this is mad men or anything

krakowski is not that attractive for someone on tv, has this been mentioned