30 Rock pilot
Originally aired: October 11, 2006
The 30 Rock pilot is not one of the shows' more beloved moments - in fact, Tina Fey herself commonly trashes it, referring to it in her book as "sweaty" and saying that her writers have asked her to stop talking about how terrible it is. And yet, the 30 Rock pilot was pretty well-received when it aired - the show became a critical darling fairly quickly, even if audiences were slow to catch on (and never even fully caught on). I remember always having a pretty "meh" reaction to the pilot, but I started watching the show a few episodes into the first season after hearing how good it was, so I didn't get the experience of having it be my first introduction to 30 Rock. This time, I tried to imagine what I would think of the episode if I had never seen the show before, rather than unfairly holding it up to what would come after it. And the truth is, the pilot is a pretty strong introduction to a television comedy series, even if that television comedy series isn't the one that 30 Rock would later become.
The biggest different in the pilot episode from what came after it, other than the fact that it's pretty grounded and seems to take place in a reality similar to the one we live in, is how important it makes the fictional Girlie Show out to be. Indeed, that show takes center stage in this episode, and the entire tension of the episode is mounted in Liz trying to retain at the creative helm even as Jack is about to turn it into a corporate entity. The pilot suggests that 30 Rock is going to be a show about striking a balance between creativity and cold-hearted business, and while the show did more or less stick with that point of view, it did so in a way that became less about TGS and more about the characters' personal lives. It's almost comical to see Liz and Jenna caring so deeply about the show here and it's hard to imagine that happening not only in later seasons, but even halfway through the first season. I don't think this was inherently intentional - simply, I think the TGS portion of the show just wasn't as fruitful for stories as the writers expected it to be and they found the characters' lives outside of the show to be far more interesting to dissect - but it almost dawned on me that maybe this is because Liz, ultimately, failed in her desire to keep TGS something she could put her stamp on. 30 Rock's worldview has always been something along the lines of "people like Jack Donaghy are ruining the world because people like Liz Lemon are too much of a mess to step up and take it from them". This thought process was particularly poignant when the show premiered smack-dab in the middle of the second Bush administration, and although the show would eventually sympathize with the Jack Donaghy point of view (particularly once Obama took office and the political discourse shifted to the other direction) it always retained that sort of world-beat vibe, the vibe of someone who was tired of sticking it to the man and just wanted to sit and be bitter for a while.
And yet, the 30 Rock pilot still had a pretty firm grasp on its characters - particularly Liz, Jack, and Tracy. Liz's introduction (as well as the introduction to the show itself) is completely perfect in the way it both highlights her character as well as the sort of exhausted crusader vibe of the show itself. And there are few character introductions more perfect than Jack Donaghy kicking down a door and saying "Lou's dead. I'm Jack Donaghy". Tracy still feels a bit less crazy than the show eventually made him, and the Jenna here is obviously a relic of what Rachel Dratch's Jenna would've been, but this is a show that seems to know what it wants to be, even if it wound bend that slightly and become something even better.
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