While NBC's "30 Rock" used to be one of the most clever and cutting-edge shows on television, it has lost much of its bite in recent years. The one-liners have become increasingly dull and the show can't seem to reach the high levels of excellence it once achieved regularly. Now entering its sixth year on the air, "30 Rock" has understandably begun to decline somewhat in quality, especially as the characters' behaviors become more and more predictable.
The series strains to find any novelty in the plot or character relationships. While "30 Rock" is still quite funny and better than many other shows on the air today, it is hard to watch the most recent season without reminiscing about how much better the show used to be.
One of the show's stars, Alec Baldwin, recently talked about ending the program's run in the next few years. While millions will miss his character, Jack Donaghy, as well as the rest of the cast, it seems right to end the series before it gets even more tired than it is now.
Much of "30 Rock's" humor stems from the absurdity of its references and the instability of its characters. After over a hundred episodes of this kind of ridiculousness, though, the show is bound to lose some of its zing.
This becomes evident from the start of this season — as early as the first episode — when Kenneth the Page, known for his innocent and naïve outlook on life, declares the world is ending tomorrow and that he will receive, "72 Virgin… Margaritas sans salt." By now, viewers expect Kenneth to add something after his pause that will transform his sentence from sexually ambiguous to just plain strange. While the line is still well crafted and acted, it is not as fresh as it would have been a few seasons ago.
"30 Rock" also used to be one of the strongest shows at parodying and satirizing American culture. Whether it was NBC's crumbling ratings or the Jay Leno/Conan O' Brien fiasco, the show always found a way of taking those convoluted situations and making them both interesting and hilarious.
In its sixth season, the show has lost this edge. It opened with a fictional parody of "America's Got Talent" (2006 — present) and "American Idol" (2002 — present) called "America's Kidz Got Singing," but the joke seems stale from the start, especially since both of the shows being lampooned have already been around for so long. Jane Krakowski's character, Jenna, is the Simon Cowell-like judge in the parody. While Jenna's character is at its funniest when she is being mean, it feels pretty strained to make fun of Cowell now, two years after he has left "Idol."
Even "30 Rock's" meta-commentaries on itself don't have the same energy they had at the start of the series.
In the season opener, Baldwin's character states that NBC loves when shows use public domain songs because they don't cost the network any money. It is clever to have that same episode end with a music montage set to "Camp Town Races." It should be a perfect end to the episode, letting the show make fun of itself and the network, but the joke comes off as too perfectly "30 Rock" to really work as well as it should. The show has tried this kind of setup too many times for it to be as amusing as it ought to be.
What hasn't changed is the solid acting. The entire cast effortlessly performs rapid-fire dialogue, elevating the material with their perfect comedic timings. The actors understand how to work off of each other's rhythm and energy, making even the weakest scenes much better.
This chemistry helps sell many of the one-liners as well, like Baldwin's very serious delivery of the line, "Next week Jay-Z was going to do a duet with one of the spinning chairs from ‘The Voice,' and the chair just pulled out!" which is built on by Krakowski's understanding nods of approval before and after the extremely silly line.
As a whole, the sixth season of "30 Rock" is simply OK. It provides nothing groundbreaking or particularly fresh, but it is funny overall and very well acted. Though it lacks the extremely memorable moments that filled the first few seasons of the series, "30 Rock" is still able to elicit more chuckles from viewers than most other shows on the air today.
