30 Rock series finale Tina Feys prime-time satire ends with a flurm happy ending
For those who missed it, or saw it and forgot, or just dont really care, a quick rundown of the main character arcs and how they ended up:
This was the 30 Rock that I knew and loved. The smart, sardonic, in-joking, obscure-referencing, taking-nothing-seriously-especially-themselves meta-sitcom. Should it live on in syndication, I would prefer that these last few atypical climactic episodes to be left out of the mix. Lets remember 30 Rock at its irreverent, iconoclastic best.
The montage at the end first jumps a year to reveal Jacks triumphant return to GE. Petes wife eventually catches up with him. Jenna flashes her boobs at the Tony Awards. Tracys dad finally returns from going out for a pack of cigarettes back when Tracy was still a kid.
This was not the 30 Rock that we have come to know and love. This was like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers clone of 30 Rock, superficially the same, but in ct kind of hollow.
If you were looking for some sort of closure from Thursday nights 30 Rock finale, you may have come away disappointed, and without really knowing why.
I think Jenna says it best when she sings at the end of the last TGS, These were the best days of my flurm.
Jack Donaghy, now CEO of Kabletown, pulls a complete 360 to become a seeker of true happiness. Which makes him miserable. Even more so after a particularly acrimonious parting of the ways with ex-mentee Liz.
Liz discovers that stay-at-home motherhood is actually her crazy, and the Gotham Moms online help site is just a minefield of latent maternal hostility. She wants to work, and Chris, with his useless degree in ethnomusicology, is content to stay at home, freeing her up to return to NBC to pitch an iffy new sitcom based on her own life to now-network president Kenneth.
All of 30 Rocks zany characters were delivered happy ending as the series came to a close.
Art Streiber / Art Streiber/NBC
When she first turns to TV drama she ends up on Law &or the first time, he says, not as an acronym for Beautiful Ladies In Short Shorts. He leaps onto a sailboat and sets out for who-knows-where, only to turn back when he is suddenly struck with a business brainstorm to rival his original trivection oven clear dishwashers, so you can see whats going in there.
By the time he starts distributing all his worldly goods,Brooklyn asian escort it looks very much to us and to Liz that he is preparing kill himself.
But it is soon revealed that cancelled TGS is still contracted for one more show, or the network will be forced to pay Tracy $30 million. Liz reluctantly (not really) agrees to return for one last week of comedy hell.
He passes. Turns out, after all this time, Kenneth is actually slightly less stupid than your average television executive.
Everyone had a personal epiphany. And an atypical lapse into normality. And one last call-back character quirk. And, worst of all, a happily ever after.
Pete confirms this, even as he sets the stage for his own suicide, though in ct his real plan is to ke it and run off to start a new life. Yeah, good luck with that.
Or, as Tracy only slightly more coherently offers, Thank you America. Thats our show. Not a lot of people watched it, but the jokes on you because we still got paid. happy ending
Jenna continues to exist i30 Rock series finale Tina Feys prime-time satire ends with a flurm happy endingn her own little world, in denial that the show is really over, but already reinventing herself by returning to her first love, be that movies or Broadway or whatever. It doesnt matter. It never takes.
Much as they have tried all season to wrap things up in a meaningful, or at least entertaining, way they came up short in both regards. Not for lack of trying. If anything, they tried too hard.
And then, many years after that, Lizs great granddaughter is pitching Lizs life story to an eerily still-youthful NBC president Kenneth. This then was the whole 30 Rock saga, all somehow contained within a snow-globe on Kenneths desk, an admirably obscure reference to the last episode of St. Elsewhere. Jet cahappy endingrs whiz by outside, invoking The Jetsons. All thats missing are the one-armed man and Bob and Emily Hartley . . . I can toss around those obscure pop-culture references too.
I think they overthought it. You cant ridicule the conventions of traditional prime-time comedy and then, finally, embrace them. Which, in their own ridiculous way, they kind of did.
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