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

"Open on...the Covent Garden Flower Market, 1892..Flahrs, flahrs for sale!"

This whole episode killed me, but the audience applauding every scene was a bit distracting.

Vulture points out 17 differences between the East and West coast performances: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/10/the_17_differences_between_30.html?f=most-commented-vulture-7d5

East Coast: Matt Damon's first appearance in the show gets wild cheers at the beginning and end of his scene.
West Coast: Stone-cold silence from the audience! Ya burnt, Damon.

i wanted to go live and motorboat those fuckers.

this was brilliant!

yeah, these were totally awesome, and anyone who didn't at least find some humor in them is stupid.

yeah this was lots of fun. at first i was kinda disappointed that it was clearly being shot on the SNL set and kinda just looked like a SNL sketch but then i was like oh why would that bother me anyway, and enjoyed how they did a lot of gags to take advantage of the format. did video of the live performance they did during the writer's strike a few years ago ever end up online or on a DVD or anything? I guess that was probably the genesis of all this.

Spaceman was amazing in the west coast version. also, there is a pamphlet on his table that says "YOU DO THE METH!" which kills me.

you do the meth! came from when jenna was offered crystal meth to lose her 'mystic pizza' weight.

i enjoyed this although as a britisher i don't get the snl stigma.

can't wait to watch these tonight

funnnier than snl has been in 30 years.

at first i was kinda disappointed that it was clearly being shot on the SNL set and kinda just looked like a SNL sketch but then i was like oh why would that bother me anyway, and enjoyed how they did a lot of gags to take advantage of the format.

yeah i was feeling the same way, but a combination of me telling myself to get over it + the brilliant julie louis dreyfuss stuff put it out of my mind

b/w seinfeld, arrested development & 30 rock, JLD has been on my three favorite tv comedies of all time -- if only she had appeared in "chappelle show" somehow

Hand Frankensteining

xxp yeah it was a bit confusing at first how it looked like SNL except there were jokes and people laughing at them

people who love 30 Rock but act like SNL is sooooo bad are fronting hard

Just watched the West coast performance. It really was a lot tighter, minus the stumbles from Tracy and Jane. I thought the East coast Spaceman bit was funnier, but liked Jon Hamm's West coast bit more. Neither was perfect, both were funny. I give the East coast one the nod, though. It was a little more loose.

I think I preferred "tie me to the radiator and put food just out of reach."

people who love 30 Rock but act like SNL is sooooo bad are fronting hard

― underrated bobos I have honked (some dude)

this is the audacious high watermark in the "people who don't like the thing i like are lying to themselves" genre of wahmbulance posts

the day Gilly appears in a 30 Rock and we all still like it I'll agree with you.

yeah snl is not very good right now

Since I didn't start watching this until the tail end of Season 2, I don't think I'd ever heard Spaceman's name pronounced by anyone but Tracy!

Also, where has Cerie been lately?

i loved the joke about snooki's mom

yeah omg we need a full jenna birthday song

Don't know if commercials are standardized and known in advance, but on my west coast station right after dr. spaceman sang "strap" a subway commercial came on that started with the word "on" and I lost it. So hope they did that on purpose or else it was an amazing coincidence.

It had to be on purpose. Because it certainly didn't make sense when I watched it on hulu.

shit, hamm killed it in the west coast version

return of the dratch!

^^^ this

They should bring her back in her random-multiple-roles role.

fonz jokes were a self-conscious shark-jumping reference, y/n?

Never thought of that...but I took it as just the logically absurd/absurdly logical extension of the "Happy Days...is my favorite show!" joke. And a show about a live show doing a live show probably doesn't constitute jumping the shark.

no shark jumped imo but i just took it as a nod to the obvious tv stunt-pulling of this ep. but i may be reading too much into it.

i thought it was setup for dratch to bust out her awesome fonzie impressions.

no i think that's a cool reading elmo!

I enjoyed this very much!

haven't seen the east coast version yet, but west coast jon hamm was the best thing i saw all night (i still love you community, but come on it's jon hamm).

I keep going on about this, because I was worried that he'd be typecast and not get good roles, but his two appearances on SNL followed by 30 Rock and now this prove that he's a totally awesome comedic actor. Maybe part of it is just the hilariousness of him NOT being Don Draper, but I look forward to seeing him do more comedy of all types.

I feel like Bill Hader was doing a Peter Graves impression during the airplane seq.

did video of the live performance they did during the writer's strike a few years ago ever end up online or on a DVD or anything?

yeah, on the S2 DVD

iirc the recording is REALLY bad, like I had to put headphones on to understand it

i'm not really into Mad Men at all so i'm totally just hoping that once that show runs its course Hamm focuses more on comedic roles

Just watched the West Coast version - honestly I liked the crazy over-reactive audience more from the East Coast version more (though maybe because I saw it first), it also gave everyone a little more time to breathe and wait between lines, the timing seemed kind of weird in the later show. Some bits were better, though.

So does Matt Damon just love the show or what? I was surprised they could even get him for a cameo, let alone a major part in an episode, let alone a multi-episode arc.

it's good for his brand. he gets cool points, etc. its not like julianne moore does a lot of t.v. either.

oh - eventually he'll break Liz's heart or vice versa.

no way, they will get married and have a spinoff show called caroliz in the city

people who love 30 Rock but act like SNL is sooooo bad are fronting hard

― underrated bobos I have honked (some dude)

this is the audacious high watermark in the "people who don't like the thing i like are lying to themselves" genre of wahmbulance posts

― MAX NOT FOR MOD (Roberto Spiralli), Friday, October 15, 2010 4:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

eh i'm just saying if you enjoyed 30 Rock live but think SNL is shit even when Fey or Baldwin is hosting the quality gap (which i admit is there) is probably much larger in your mind than in reality

forgetting whether snl is very good or not, it's clearly quite different to 30 rock.

i'd agree w/ al very slightly, until this season (where the hosts have been great and the shows still really subpar) i'd have said that recent snl is as good as the host; obv this is true of all eras of snl but recently it has really lived or died by the host. when i was watching the 30 rock though i did think it was weird that there was a certain amount of slack i was extending it that i never think about extending snl. maybe it's cuz snl is SUCH a finely tuned machine whereas there was a heavy element of 'what is this going to be like/how will they pull it off' (i never saw the live er, but live drew carey or roc etc never had this charge cuz they weren't single camera shows; it was more a return to how early tv worked instead of a show doing what it never does like 30 rock). the only time i can think of something similar to the julie louis dreyfus thing w/ snl, where there was a dilemma imposed by the live factor and you wondered how they were gonna solve it, was the 92 debates when carvey had been impersonating bush and perot (and there they just copped out and filmed one of the parts). somewhat wishing now tracy had had a cutaway if only to see who would've played him (does martin lawrence have that much of a sense of humor about himself?).

the difference between 30 rock and snl is that 30 rock has jokes. lots of them. snl was never big on jokes. a 6000 post thread quoting every minute of every episode of 30 rock is some sort of testament to that.

snl is a show made up on the fly which is why it has always been staffed by improv people. but this means that it will always be horribly uneven and only as good as the people involved in a sketch.