Acceptance

Apparently this was a good week for those shows that I still follow mostly out of habit. I already spent a good deal of time writing about how Glee managed to impress me, but this morning I put on Thursday's episode of 30 Rock and received an equally pleasant surprise.

For some reason, I found myself laughing at at a fairly decent portion of the jokes, as compared to my regular carefully calculated percentage of "almost none."

What was different about this week's episode? That's a very good question.

Maybe I'm just sentimentally attached to Valentines Day themed episodes for some inexplicable reason. That doesn't seem terribly likely though, as my experiences with Valentine's Day celebrations, and V-Day episodes by association, tend to average in the negative and peak at neutral zero.

More likely though, it's was a specific moment when the characters acknowledged their ridiculous simplicity. I have always complained the characters in 30 Rock are too dependent on two or three mildly amusing character traits on which the writers have tried to build entire motivations and decision making processes. If that sentence made as little sense as I think it did, basically I meant that the characters don't seem even remotely real (really? I'm complaining about characterization in a show that has intentionally never developed its characters? Yes. I am. I'm a pompous dick that way). Liz is an aging food obsessed woman. Jack is an absurdly patriotic right wing corporate nut. Tracy is a moron. Jenna is self involved. Lutz is pathetic. Kenneth is insane. Pete is a coward. Etc. I can never get emotionally invested in their antics because I can't imagine myself, or anyone I know, actually caring about any of their incredibly limited problems. Anyway, this has always been a sticking point for me with regards to the show.

This week though, they finally made their steady single-track motivations into a joke. Liz and Carol get in a fight, and Jack and Avery almost cross the Canadian border in a mobile meth lab because all four of them are motivated by one single characteristic that can not be budged. In the case of Liz and Carol, apparently it was stubbornness. With Jack and Avery it was patriotism. In the end, Jack is the only one who "quits," and he ends up being the most realistically human person on the show... ever.

Again, I am willing to admit that I'm looking for too much out of a show that made Kenneth a regular character, but that's part of why I don't like 30 Rock, I don't want to have to compromise my intelligence to laugh at Tracy's complete lack thereof.

I'll point you back to my first blog, and the Studio 60 quote therein. It pretty much sums up my feelings.

So good job, 30 Rock, for acknowledging your simplistic humor enough to divert from it a bit.

Don't worry, I won't expect it again next week.