30 Rock Tonight!

Promising review from Media Life:

As smart as “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” is--and it is very--it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny. That’s kind of ironic, considering the show is about really funny people who write for and act on a late-night sketch comedy show.

But then “Studio 60” is very Sorkinian, a drama that, though set in the world of comedy, takes itself very seriously in the way that “The West Wing” took itself, along with its subject, the presidency, so seriously. That's Aaron Sorkin for you.
“30 Rock's” great strength is that it entirely lacks such gravitas. That's Tina Fey for you.

"30 Rock," which premieres tonight on NBC, chooses rather to be funny. It's a comedy about comedy, as the other, far-less-talked about new series based on a late-night comedy sketch show, and it freely embraces the anarchic comedic energy of Fey, its writer and star.

Fey infuses "Rock" with a late-night sensibility from her years as head writer of “Saturday Night Live,” and it comes alive with that anything-can-happen feeling of sketch comedy done well. It helps that "SNL" creator Lorne Michaels is listed as executive producer.

Fey is abetted by a cast that perfectly understands her humor and acts into it, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan, Jane Krakowski and Rachel Dratch. They reach beyond one-liners to develop their characters as true ensemble players.

Fey is Liz Lemon, the head writer of an NBC sketch comedy series, “The Girlie Show.” Jack Donaghy (Baldwin) is her new network boss, and a bombastic fool. He tells Liz that the show must be revamped to draw in more young male viewers, and he recommends hiring Tracy Jordan (Morgan, “SNL”), a film star, one not entirely balanced in the head, whose filmography includes “White Cop, Black Cop” and “Who Dat Ninja?”

The star of “The Girlie Show” is Jenna (Jane Krakowski, “Ally McBeal”), whom Jack takes an immediate liking to. Liz works to keep her show on track while sparring with her boss and babysitting her borderline-unhinged new star.

That loose plot structure works much like a comedy sketch format in allowing “Rock” the freedom to go on wild tangents, such as having Tracy do a karaoke rendition of Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” at a strip club called Dark Sensations.

Fey plays Liz as the seemingly normal, if world-weary, center of a circle fringed by eccentricity, and as such she's an ideal foil for the Morgan and Baldwin characters to bounce off. At one point, in utter deadpan, Jordan tells Liz, "White dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets."

But of course Liz is not really normal at all. Irked by a man who cuts in line at a hot dog stand, she chooses to teach him a lesson by buying every last hot dog.

In real life, Baldwin takes himself and his politics quite seriously, and for that he often comes off as a buffoon. But on "30 Rock," playing a buffoon, he delivers a subtlety to his part that's to die for, whispering non-sequiturs of the sort we'd expect from the worst sort of network empty suit in pinstripes. As the boss born without a tact filter, he tells Liz, “I like you. You have the boldness of a much younger woman.”

“Rock” is sometimes uneven, likely because a number of changes that were made to the original pilot, including replacing Dratch with Krakowski as the star of the sketch show-within-the-show and relegating Dratch to a supporting player.

“Rock” will likely suffer unevenness going forward, but it will never lack for comedic energy of the sort that Fey brought to "SNL" and that defined that show for so many decades.