Quick spoilers for last night's "30 Rock" coming up just as soon as I go to Burning Man...Because "30 Rock" always has so much going on, and because the punchlines fly by so fast, I never feel like I completely wasted my time watching an episode. But a few good punchlines (Jack's recollection about why his dad would occasionally come back, Tracy talking about being born in Yankee Stadium, Liz chewing out Tim the baby daddy) aside, this one felt really flat.
I think the ideas behind two of the stories (Liz/Becca and Jack/Frank) were fine, but they needed to be taken further. Liz needed to become more monstrous and manipulative before being guilted back to reality by John Lithgow, and I think the writers could have taken Jack and Frank's new friendship, and Jack recreating the "Harry and the Hendersons" climax, to more ridiculous extremes than they did. It felt like both stories were almost there, but needed one more pass through the script.
I'm not sure the Tracy/Jenna plot would have worked no matter how many rewrites it got. With a few exceptions like the weight-gain arc from last season, Jenna's such a one-note character that she only works in small doses, popping in to comment on other people's stories. Watching her pout about other people stealing focus from her gets tiresome, quickly.
Ah, well. Can't win 'em all, and at least Josh appeared (briefly) for the first time in a long time.
What did everybody else think?
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