by Tina Fey
LIZ
You mean Gretchen Thomas? The brilliant plastics engineer-slash-lesbian?
(off his puzzled look)
What made you think I was gay?
JACK
Your shoes.
Liz looks down at her shoes. They are pretty borderline.
LIZ
Well, I’m straight.
JACK
Those shoes are bi-curious.
Our youngest writer was Donald Glover. He had just graduated from NYU’s writing program and was still living in a dorm and working as an RA. Donald was our only African American writer at the time, but his real diversity was that he was our only “cool young person” who could tell us what the “kids were listening to these days.” Also, because he came from a large family in Georgia, he was very helpful in writing for the character Kenneth the Page. MVP joke: a scene where Jenna (Jane Krakowski) is trying to teach Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) how to brag about himself in a passive-aggressive way.
JENNA
Not even a “back door” brag?
KENNETH
What’s a “back door” brag?
JENNA
It’s sneaking something wonderful about yourself into everyday conversation. Like when I tell people, “It’s hard for me to watch ‘American Idol,’ because I have perfect pitch.”
KENNETH
Oh… ew.
JENNA
Now you try.
KENNETH
It’s hard for me to watch “American Idol” ’cause there’s a water bug on my channel changer.
It’s hard for me to pinpoint what I like most about that joke. Is it that Kenneth is truly incapable of bragging? The revelation that Kenneth’s apartment is crawling with water bugs? No, I think it’s the use of the grandmotherly expression “channel changer.”
As for Robert Carlock, his strengths are erudite references, absurd joke constructions, and White Male Malaise in a multicultural world. MVP episodes: 105, “Jacktor”; 215, “Sandwich Day”; 310,
“Generalissimo”; 416, “Apollo, Apollo.” MVP joke: too many to name, but the character that flows from him the most freely is Dr. Leo Spaceman (Chris Parnell). At the end of season 1, Jack suffers a heart attack. His unscrupulous showbiz doctor comes out to the waiting room to give Liz, Jack’s mother (Elaine Stritch), and Jack’s fiancée (Emily Mortimer) a prognosis.
Dr. Spaceman enters from I.C.U. His lab coat is covered in blood. The women all gasp.
DR. SPACEMAN
What, this? No, no, I was at a costume party earlier this evening… and the hostess’s dog attacked me so I had to stab it.
Perhaps the Carlockian worldview is best summed up by this exchange from a recent episode, when Tracy arrives at the hospital just after the birth of his daughter.
TRACY (O.C.) (CONT’D)
Why is the baby covered in goop?!
DR. SPACEMAN (O.C.)
Because everything about this is disgusting!
Taking the World by Storm! (Storm Downgraded to Light Rain by
Weather Experts)
We premiered on Wednesday, October 11, 2006, at 8:00 P.M. and we were an instant hit—like figs for dessert or bringing your guitar out at a party. We were New Coke!
We were not a hit.
But we barreled ahead knowing that we’d at least come out of this with DVDs to show our friends. The story ideas came fast and furious in the beginning. “What if Tracy went off his medication and started hallucinating a little blue dude everywhere?” Sure. “What if Jenna was in a movie called The Rural Juror and no one could understand her when she said the title?” Fine. “What if we do a story about Liz being called a cunt?” Why wouldn’t we? That had happened to me plenty!*
You know that saying “Dance as if no one is watching”? Well, that’s what we were doing. We were dancing with abandon, and no one was watching. Actually, about five and a half million people were watching, but that counts as nothing. In my Chicago theater days, the rule was there had to be more people in the audience than on the stage or we cancelled the show. Although once I did a two-woman play called Ironmistress for an audience of two. So five million people seemed pretty good to me. But back when Friends was in its prime, they had about twenty-five million viewers. We were in jeopardy.
I don’t think Robert Carlock unpacked his suitcase that whole first year. He probably didn’t even buy full gallons of milk, assuming we’d be cancelled any minute and he’d have to chug the whole thing and get back on the plane to Los Angeles.
I proceeded with the blithe confidence of a moron. I was the baby in the movie Baby’s Day Out, toddling down the street, completely unaware that an anvil had just fallen behind me.* Conversely, every time the office phone rang, Robert put his coat on. That was the burden of his higher intelligence.
We worked incredibly hard that first year, and every year since. Carlock and I can’t believe we used to complain about the hours at SNL, which now seem like a cakewalk. Especially for me, because that’s all I did my first two years at SNL: walk around and look for cake. For context, I’ve attached a chart that shows the relative stress levels of various jobs.
Jeff Zucker and NBC president of Primetime Development Kevin Reilly proved to be real champions of the show. We started making jokes about NBC and its then parent company, GE, almost immediately. We didn’t have anything against GE or even really know anything about GE, but we had painted ourselves into a corner by making it Jack Donaghy’s workplace in the show. When Carlock got a call one day from a woman in the GE Legal Department disputing the accuracy of a GE mention in one of our scripts, we were confused and nervous. Why does the parent company have our scripts? Is this going to happen every week? Don’t they know I’m the baby from Baby’s Day Out? Apparently it was Mr.
Zucker who personally intervened and explained to his more corporate peers that these were just jokes and we were to be left alone. Maybe he assumed we’d be dead soon. Whatever the reason, I appreciate NBC for letting us make jokes about them all the time. I don’t think ABC or CBS would stand for that abuse, and I’ll probably never find out.
Doing, Learning, Dying
We shoot 30 Rock on film, like a little movie each week. This means that we film every line of dialogue about five times from about five different angles. Every time we switch angles it takes about twenty minutes to move the cameras around. Every five minutes the cameras run out of film and we have to reload. If someone’s getting on our fake elevator in a scene, it usually takes an extra five tries to have the elevator door close at the right time. You don’t even want to know what happens if there’s a dog, cat, parrot, baby, or peacock in the shot. And worst of all, our cast and crew like one another and enjoy lively conversations. All this jocularity adds up to about fourteen hours a day.
(If we shot on this newfangled hi-def video it would go faster, but we would look like the zombie backup dancers in Thriller.)
We only shoot in this “single camera” style because it is currently the fashion. Classic shows like Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Seinfeld were shot “multi-camera” in front of an audience. I’m pretty sure it took about three hours a week. I don’t know why the network’s taste changed to single-camera shows, but there’s no bucking fashion trends. If that were possible, I’d still be wearing this amazing pair of light blue jeans I owned in college that had four built-in belts across the front.
That first season when we shot on location in Manhattan, people would stop to watch before realizing we were not Sex and the City, when they would leave immediately. I learned a lot about acting that year. What I learned about Film Acting is that it’s mostly about not standing in other people’s light, and remembering what hand you had your papers in. When you do your “off-camera” lines for someone, you try to put your head real close to the camera. That’s about it. You’re a trained film actor now.
Anything I learned about Real Acting I learned from watching Alec Baldwin. By Real Acting I mean “an imitation of human behavior that is bot
h emotionally natural and mechanically precise enough as to elicit tears or laughter from humans.” Alec is a master of both Film Acting and Real Acting.
He can play the emotion at the core of a scene—he is falling in love, his mother is torturing him, his mentor has been reincarnated as a peacock—while reciting long speeches word for word and hitting all the jokes with the right rhythm. You would be surprised how many major Oscar-winning movie stars cannot do this. There are only about nine people in the world who can do this; maybe three more that we don’t know about in North Korea.
Alec knows how to let the camera come to him. He can convey a lot with a small movement of his eyes. He speaks so quietly sometimes that I can barely hear him when I’m standing next to him, but when you watch the film back, it’s all there.
It may not have made me a better actor, but at least now I know why what I’m doing is terrible.
After each fourteen-hour acting class was over, I would meet up with five or six writers at my apartment to catch up on what they had written during the day. During those early days we’d order food and work until one or two in the morning. My husband, Jeff, sat in what was meant to be a pantry and wrote music to score the show. We kept a video baby monitor next to the computer screen, and I could watch my daughter sleeping while we worked. I would excuse myself occasionally to change a diaper in the night. Usually for the baby. These will definitely be my happiest memories of this time, because everything I cared about was within ten feet of me. One night I put my daughter to bed, worked with the writers all night, and in the morning when she toddled out, the writers were still there. It was the best worst thing ever.
Another night to remember: Around three A.M., Carlock and I were leading a rewrite in my living room and realized that we had both fallen asleep while talking. When we woke up a few moments (or hours?) later, the other writers were just sitting politely, awaiting further instruction. That is a dedicated staff.
The only downside was that the next day’s work began at six A.M. In spite of the exhaustion, I am proud to say I lost my cool only once, in my kitchen. “It’s too much. It’s just too much work,” I sobbed to my husband. Please refer to the Coal Mining and Military Service sections of Chart A for perspective.
I turned to domestic violence only once. We were going to bed at three A.M., knowing we’d have to get back up at five thirty A.M., and my husband kept talking and talking as a joke when I was trying to fall asleep. His exhaustion had given him the giggles, and he kept poking me and waking me up saying things like “Hey, I gotta ask you one more thing. Do you like pretzels?” I flew off my pillow and shoved him so hard across the bed that I saw genuine fear flash across his face. It was one of the very few “deleted scenes from Star 80” in my life.
There is one other embarrassing secret I must reveal, something I’ve never admitted to anyone.
Though we are grateful for the affection 30 Rock has received from critics and hipsters, we were actually trying to make a hit show. We weren’t trying to make a low-rated critical darling that snarled in the face of conventionality. We were trying to make Home Improvement and we did it wrong. You know those scientists who were developing a blood-pressure medicine and they accidentally invented Viagra? We were trying to make Viagra and we ended up with blood-pressure medicine.
No matter how many times we tried to course-correct the show to make it more accessible—slow the dialogue down, tell fewer stories per episode, stop putting people in blackface—the show would end up careening off the rails again. In my limited experience, shows are like children. You can teach them manners and dress them in little sailor suits, but in the end, they’re going to be who they’re going to be.
By episode eleven 30 Rock had really found its voice, and it was the voice of a crazy person. The episode ended up being called “Black Tie,” but while we were shooting we referred to it as “Good-bye, America.” We were coming to the end of our initial order and there was no sign of our being picked up again. The other reason we were calling it “Good-bye, America” was because this episode was nuts. If we had any concern that the show was too weird to succeed, we certainly weren’t helping ourselves with this one. The main story of the episode is that Alec’s character, Jack Donaghy, attends a birthday party for his friend, an inbred Austrian prince named Gerhardt Hapsburg.
Gerhardt Hapsburg was played by Paul Reubens, the genius known to most as Pee-wee Herman.
Paul committed deeply to his role. He chose to wear fake teeth and pale makeup, and he had one tiny ivory hand (years before Kristen Wiig’s tiny hands on SNL, our writers would want me to point out). In case you were wondering if 30 Rock would ever be a commercial hit, look at this picture.
In the story, Jenna (Jane Krakowski) is determined to “Grace Kelly” herself by meeting and marrying Gerhardt and becoming a princess. This culminates in a scene where she dances for the prince.
Jane danced (like no one was watching) as Paul improvised, calling out different dance styles: “Jazz! Tap!
Jitterbug! Charleston! Interpretive! Twirl! Twirl again! Keep twirling!” After he professes his love for Jenna and she reciprocates, Gerhardt takes a sip of celebratory champagne, knowing that it will kill him because his malformed body cannot metabolize grapes. He dies immediately. This was our best attempt at writing a sitcom.
Poor Gerhardt serves as a metaphor for the show itself—strange but not stupid, desperate to be loved but abhorrent to most. A proud member of an aristocracy that no longer existed—network television.
Some Unsolicited Theories About Television
Gerhardt’s picture leads me to something else I’d like to acknowledge, which is what a human-looking cast we are. Sure, Alec has a movie star face and Jane is leggy and blond, but the cumulative age of our series regulars is 210, and even the African Americans among us are pretty pasty. I personally like a cast with a lot of different-shaped faces and weird little bodies and a diverse array of weak chins, because it helps me tell the characters apart. When actors are too good-looking, I can’t memorize them. For example, I have never seen a picture of Sienna Miller where I didn’t say, “That girl’s pretty. Who is that?”
For years the networks have tried to re-create the success of Friends by making pilot after pilot about beautiful twenty-somethings living together in New York. Beautiful twenty-somethings living in Los Angeles. Beautiful twenty-somethings investigating sexy child murders in Miami.
This template never works, because executives refuse to realize that Friends was the exception, not the rule. The stars of beloved shows like Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, Newhart, and The Dick Van Dyke Show had normal human faces. And that’s what some of the people on our show have.
When you watched Sanford and Son, you didn’t want to have sex with everybody you saw, just Grady. I’ve never understood why every character being “hot” was necessary for enjoying a TV show. It’s the same reason I don’t get Hooters. Why do we need to enjoy chicken wings and boobies at the same time? Yes, they are a natural and beautiful part of the human experience. And so are boobies. But why at the same time? Going to the bathroom is part of life, but we wouldn’t go to a restaurant that had toilets for seats… or would we? Excuse me while I call my business manager.
He said it’s a “nonstarter.” They already have that in Japan.
The week after “Good-bye America,” we shot episode twelve, which was called “The Baby Show.” It was officially the last show of our order. Members of our crew were calling around looking for their next job. On set, people started eyeing the furniture, wondering what it would go for in the Cancellation Fire Sale.
Don Fey happened to be visiting the set that last week when Kevin Reilly called to say that we were picked up for the rest of the season. I may never know why they chose to keep the show going (Alec Baldwin), but my proudest moment as an adult was walking back onto the soundstage and telling everyone they still had jobs. (My proudest moment as a child was the time I beat my uncle Pierre at Scrabble with the sev
en-letter word FARTING.)
By March, the first season of 30 Rock was complete. (For the record: no epidural, group vaginal delivery, did not poop on the table.) That September we won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series.
Now, I know I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said hundreds of times, but 30 Rock is the perfect symbol for the pro-life movement in America. Here’s this little show that no one thought would make it. I’m sure NBC considered getting rid of it, but by the time we won the Emmy, they were too far along.
As the mother of this now five-year-old show, would I still rather have a big, strong Two and a Half Men than our sickly little program? No, I would not, because I love my weird little show. I think this show was put on earth to teach me patience and compassion.