Hi, best friends! Excuse me, I mean, hello secondary friends. (Television is my best friend.) I think that a lot of you watch these shows on Hulu over the weekend and cannot participate in my recap conversations. Um, what do you do on Thursday nights? I don’t get it.
Whatever, I’m blogging this shit anyways.
30 Rock
Taking cues from real life, this episode handled the aftermath of a Tracy Jordan anti-gay comment, echoing an identical situation created by Tracy Morgan last summer. Liz is characteristically annoyed about having to clean up after Tracy, pointing out that the gays are the wrong group to piss off because they are highly organized: “the gays make the Japanese look like the Greeks.” After Liz publicly calls Tracy an idiot, Tracy organizes a protest of the network by idiots, with celebrity spokeswoman Denise Richards. I don’t know if Denise Richards is the biggest celebrity idiot I can think of, and her showing up to mock herself is decidedly unidiotic, so way to fuck things up, Denise.
More idiot stuff below this jump.
The gay staff is protesting TGS so Jenna has nobody to perfectly light her face; she and Kenneth dig around for lights, making a huge, poisonous mess in a storage room. This B story is cool but mostly I want to say this: Jane Krakowski’s Jenna has some of the best lines and delivery on this show. She doesn’t get enough cred. I get the sense that her comedy chops are overlooked for the flashier Tracy Morgan, girl nerd hero Tina Fey, and the nicely-coiffed twitterer Alec Baldwin. What the hell? Jenna’s bits about extremely weird sex stuff and plots to poison Jenny McCarthy are gold. She needs more love, so Jane Krakowski: I hereby give you (weird or not weird, not going to clarify) internet love.
Also, Jack is forcing his way into Liz’s head about her new dude, Criss, including challenging the silent/omitted letters in his name. He points out that she’d only hidden her romance because the guy is an unemployed “entrepreneur” with a ukulele and credit card for the Sunglass Hut. Will Jack’s check to Criss be enough to get him out of Liz’s apartment? Will he actually be the awesome guy Liz deserves (but we kind of hope she doesn’t find because it’s funny this way)? THEORIES, PLEASE.
Oh, and anybody else notice Jack’s non-Jonathan assistant in the background? That actor ditched 30 Rock for fucking Whitney. What a chump.
Parks and Recreation
As I mentioned last week, I am totally loving that the show’s focus has returned to the rag-tag team of city government employees rather than romances. Everybody got tons of awesome lines last night! I am definitely going to follow Ron’s example of answering annoying people’s “How are you?” with “Present.”
Leslie is down 70 points in her city council campaign as we meet her opponent, Sweetums heir Bobby Newport, played by none other than our collective dream guy, Paul Rudd. My deep, audible sigh when he came onto the screen lasted so long that my husband had time to glare at me, roll his eyes, wait a couple seconds, then go “come on, stop.” I am sure mine was not the only squee, amirite ladies? AND dudes? (Don’t lie.)
Bobby Newport’s advertising is all over town, and while he has no discernible message aside from liking dogs and his dad is friends with John Cougar Mellencamp, he is poised to win. He doesn’t even know he has a candidate when he meets Leslie. Ben, as campaign manager, pushes Leslie to go negative in her ads, but she refuses. They settle on running an ad online showing the video a 10-year-old Leslie had made. When Bobby sees it and realizes Leslie might be a contender, he meets with her and whines for her to stop for no real reason other than he wants to win, which of course, does not fly.
I love that Rudd guest-starred here and hope he’s around for a few more episodes. I also hope his character gets a bit more meat. Fingers crossed it will be awesome. I bet it will be. I mean, come on:
During all that, Ron is gleefully helping Chris fire people, and April and Andy are using their insurance to get a bunch of medical care for a variety of ailments.One thing I don’t get about April around Andy — isn’t she supposed to be smart? She gets confused by basic living tasks and that seems inconsistent with her schtick. Or am I just assuming she’s smart because she has brown hair?
The only funny note I took from that episode was Ron saying “present.” What awesome lines did I miss? And what do you guys think is going to happen with Bobby Newport?
The Office
Jim pranked Dwight. There was a pool party. Shit got weird.
Up All Night
Megan Mullaley is showing up on every sitcom I watch, and I like it.
In general, I thought it was too soon on the network comedy imitating life bit re: Tracy stand-up. If they were going to go there, they needed to have him verbatim say what he ACTUALLY said. Not some obviously inoffensive stuff to pass the network; to me it devalued the apology issued last summer. Though Tracy calling Glad instead of GLAAD was pretty funny. /LGBT
I like where P&R is going – Chris definitely feels lonely without Ben! I like how Ron was torn between his love of delivering bad news and trimming city waste and his dislike for advancement/responsibility.
I have no clue what they’re doing with April and Andy. Yes, April would be smarter than she is being portrayed. They’re relationship works when Andy is dumb and April is too apathetic to care. April would have these life skills, just not care enough to use them.
1. 30 Rock just wasn’t funny last night.
2. Jenna has some great lines and is a great character, but I feel like I can write the joke the second before she starts the aside you know she is ending every single fucking line with “like that time I.”
3. It’s always disappointing when the first couple eps of a season sucks, since they’ve presumably had all that time to prepare to knock it out of the park, and 30 Rock’s seems to always start slow, with only one exception I can think of.
4. P&R was amazing. AS USUAL. Highlights: the guys making the negative ad and voiceover, Paul Rudd’s ad with his fancy dog, Andy getting hit by/hitting everything, Andy’s “symptom” listing (Ann: “some of those are real, some of those are just being a person”)
5. I continue to be unamused at the lazy retardification (Andyzation?) of April.
6. Up All Night has some good moments, and Maya Rudolph is amazing in everything, but it’s just too damn domestically typical to be as funny as it could be with those great actors.
7. With that said, Mulally was fan-fucking-tastic, as usual.
8. We watched way more of the Office than usual (usual would be “not at all”) because of the promos with the dog version of Dwight. Other than that, the Office feels like I’m at a party where all the cool people left an hour ago.
Did Whitney get canceled? The dude from Whitney was funny in an episode from season 1 of Workaholics. EOM
Yes, April is being Andyized…but isn’t that how relationships go? She is savvy about some things, but “life skills” maybe not so much.
And the voiceover practice…my greatest LOL in a long while.
@ROM
Whitey… did I just write “Whitey”? I mean, WHITNEY has been moved to Wednesday nights at 8 pm right before the equally horrible “Are You There Chelsea?” (Is NBC TRYING to kill us??)
@6, it’s in our best interest that these shows fail. Community has a better chance of surviving if these shows die.
@ 2, § 6: I touched on this last week – Up All Night has an awesome cast but is not yet an awesome show. I think it needs a little time to figure out what it wants to be. While I’d rather we had Community back, hey, at least it’s not Whitney.
I noticed jack’s non Jonathon non Indian assistant too. I think he’s kinda hot. And I second that Jenna is hilarious and doesn’t get enough props