30 Rock 10/11

Tina Fey: Loved
Tracy Morgan: Hated
Rest: Meh

Was a stronger showing than I expected. I’m not sure if I can watch Tracy Morgan each week though.

Well, that wasn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever seen but I still liked it better than Studio 60. It was unpretentious with some decent gags and Alec Baldwin was great.

What we saw of the sketch show is already more amusing than anything we’ve seen from the other show. I think Tina Fey is showing that she’ll have an ability to make fun of sketch material that doesn’t work (like everyone doing their Jay Lenos or the cat lady sketch falling apart) rather than having everybody pretend that medicocre material is hysterically funny.

I think they’re going to have to tone down Tracy Morgan, though. A regualr character can’t be that off the wall crazy all the time or it will just become old and tiresome. Still, all in all, a decent half hour.

Pretty much, yes. Though Alec Baldwin can be entertaining just by being Alec Baldwin. Which he’ll almost have to be if it doesn’t get funnier, because while all of the women in the cast are completely hot and Tina Fey showed some talent, it’s hard to work in cats every week, and the only two jokes that got me to smile were both cat-related (“oh, I had to put my two to sleep!”, and, of course, throwing the cat, which never fails).

Basically, this was sort of mediocre, but has a ton of potential… and would probably have more if Tracy Morgan wasn’t prominently involved.

it SUH-UCKED!!!

Not all that good, and the whoring for General Electric means I won’t watch again.

I don’t mind a subtle plug for a product, but when the script becomes a commercial, that’s bullshit. Has Alec Baldwin fallen so far that he’s shilling now?

There were a few good lines, but nothing that really meant all that much to me, and the blatant plug was the last straw. Hell, they didn’t even bother to make the commercial plug funny.

Alec Baldwin was pretty good but he usually is.
Tina Fey was almost tolerable.
Tracy Morgan was unwatchable.
Jane Krakowski was slightly less watchable than Tracy Morgan.

This could very well have been worse than anything I’ve ever seen on television. It tried way way too hard and all the humour fell flat for me. Every situation was something I’ve seen thousands of times before - but not as funny.

Yeah, I was really bothered by that. Ok, drink a coke with the label facing the camera if you must. But don’t fucking go on for 30 seconds about a friggin oven!

I gave it it’s full run, but I doubt I’ll be back. Tracy Morgan was too annoying.

I just watched this until the first commercial.

I didn’t really know anything about it except for Alec Baldwin - who is always great - and Tina Fey - who is kinda, though not ridiculously, hot - were in it, so I figured it would be pretty good.

Within the first 10 seconds and I said, “If this is going to be SNL with a plot, I’m turning it off.” I was mostly joking; I just thought they started with a couple of lame lines.

By the time they mentioned “Tracy Jordan” I looked at my wife and whimpered, Is it going to be Tracy Morgan?!

When it showed him running around in his underwear screaming about being a jedi, I pulled at my hair and started laughing hysterically - I mean like someone actually suffering from hysteria. When the commercial came on I stopped the recording and took it off of my tivo list.

This is very, very possibly the worst thing I have ever seen on tv.

I thought it worked better than expected. It’s a pilot, remember, with all the actors playing their parts a bit larger-than-life. Jane Krakowski is already a much more believable member of a sketch variety show than Sarah Paulson and we can see why they demoted Rachel Dratch to playing weird characters. (If she were still the star the show would be over.)

The GE references worked for me as mocking GE. Because we’re all so ludicrously obsessed with television and celebrity we totally forget that NBC is a tiny, insignificant corner of a manufacturing conglomerate able to crush the network between its toes just for a laugh. If any other network had bought the show, they would have to make the parent company fictional and that would kill all the humor. Mocking GE by name is hysterical.

The writing was sharp. I’ve never found the other one camera sitcoms on today to be very funny - and I think their ratings prove it. (Those terrible numbers for Studio 60 - they would be an improvement for the Office, and that’s on Thursday, a night with twice the average audience.) Tracy Morgan was playing Eddie Murphy better than anyone at Studio 60 plays anyone.

And we won’t be seeing more than snippets of sketches on this show either:

http://www.zap2it.com/tv/zap-30rockpremiere,0,4808084.story

I’ll give it more weeks to work out the kinks. Few sitcoms click until they’ve been on at least a half season. But this is still the best new sitcom I’ve watched this year.

Four words: The War at Home.
Its’ a pilot, people. Chill. Very few shows hit a homer on their first at-bat. I thought it was pretty amusing. No laugh out loud moments*, but good for a smile.
*Strike that. (Fake) Cat abuse is always funny.

Loved Alec Baldwin, loved Tracy Morgan.

Tina Fey didn’t cut it as an actress, though. She had a lot of one-liners, but one-liners are supposed to seem like the casually tossed-off witticisms of someone far cleverer than any real person; hers just seemed like someone getting easy setups to read jokes from a script. (“What happened to your head?” “Oh, the sky is falling.”)

When her writer (Pete?) said, “Don’t buy all the hot dogs,” I winced; it was a painfully clumsy attempt at some in-episode continuity. “Studio 60”–which I LOVE–gets the tone of that stuff right.

And I’m sure the “black nerd” was incredibly funny on paper.

I thought it was pretty good. I thought Alec Baldwin was great. And I like that GE is willing to use its own name and make fun of itself. For those who think that was a commercial, I’d like to point out that GE is portraying one of its own executives, and the inventor of that oven, as a buffoon. I find it more honest than the Studio 60 fake-name-for-everything-but-we-really-know-who-they’re-talking-about thing.

It wasn’t great, but not many comedies are. I’d say that it has potential. There were some funny moments, and I totally believed the writers as funny guys, unlike Studio 60.

A lot of people were worried that 30 Rock would fall under Studio 60’s shadow and suffer by comparison. I think it might be the other way around. Seeing the way the cast and writers behave, and the wit they display when bantering with each other, is going to make the Studio 60 cast and crew look that much more boring.

I missed the first 10 minutes or so, but I enjoyed what I saw of the show - there were a few good yucks. If it never rose above this episode, it would be an okay show, but I probably wouldn’t stick with it too long.

I’m with rosie and drm. I lasted until the 18 minute mark. I thought I could watch Tina Fey for a half hour, but apparently only if Alec Balbwin and Jane Krajowski aren’t sharing screen time with her, and if Tracy Morgan isn’t acting like a damn fool.

I really don’t see too much cross over in viewers between this and Studio 60.

If it was mocking, it’d be one thing. But they threw in an actual commercial for an actual GE product, complete with ad copy, and played it absolutely straight. That crosses the line.

I didn’t see it that way at all–I thought it was hilarious (the funniest thing in the show) that Alec Baldwin’s speech was mirrored exactly in the following commercial. I thought at first it was a parody ad and kept expecting him to show up!

The show was “feh,” but I’ll keep watching it for him–he’s a brilliant comic actor.

As a comfort-food sitcom, I thought it was pretty good. Baldwin was great and while I normally can’t stand Jane Krakowski, I thought she was well-cast as a self-obsessed star I can’t quite stand. I wonder how they will establish a friendship between her and Fey - can’t see the friend-chemistry there…

And yeah, Rachel Dratch would not have worked…

I looked at the GE ref’s as satire and poking fun - if GE is willing to put up with the abuse, then yes they get product placement - but as long as there is abuse, I am okay with it…

I’ll give it another week or two, but it didn’t work as well as I’d expected.

I honestly thought the “trivection oven” was a joke, and when I saw the commercial for it, I thought it was part of the show. Then it turned out to be real. I had no idea. I was a bit put off by it at that point. But at first , the way Alec Baldwin talked it up, I thought it was one of the funnier parts of the show (can it really cook a turkey in 22 minutes?).

I rather liked it.
But that’s because Crazy random ramblings from crazy people works for me.

The Oven thing may have been a joke… We’ll have to wait…

Regardless it was 100 times better than the show that followed it. (You know you have crap when they resort to canned laughter)

I didn’t get any big laughs, but Alec Baldwin was great and I thought everyone else was at least good. The oven stuff in the office was hilarious, but I didn’t notice there was a real commercial for a similar real product as I watched it on DVR. Which brings me to my biggest complaint, the stoopid DVR stopped recording at 27 minutes, so I missed the very end. Which is annoying.

I did the DVR “series recording” for it, I’m giving it some time. I could watch Alec Baldwin for several more weeks.