Quick thoughts on last night's "30 Rock" coming up just as soon as I take a low-volume shower with Ed Begley Jr...This was the strongest overall Thursday this season for NBC's comedies, and "Sun Tea" brought the evening to a fine close. Not all of it worked, but enough of it did (in that usual "30 Rock" power hitter way) that I was left happy.
Hell, if the episode had been 21 minutes of dead air and just the 10 seconds of Kathy Geiss using Teddy Ruxpin in a suit as her lawyer, I would have given "Sun Tea" my stamp of approval. (I'm easy that way. And note that a more casually-dressed Ruxpin was also in the photo of the Geiss family in happier times.)
But Liz's apartment story felt like a throwback to the sort of thing the show might have done a couple of years ago when the scale was slightly smaller, and it was a nice showcase for Dotcom's alleged improv skills. (I particularly liked, in his list of stereotypical Angry Black Man threats, that he was going to "take things out of context" all the time.) The environment story tied in nicely with both Frank's disgusting jars and the apartment plot, and if the show recycled Al Gore's whale joke from "Greenzo" (while acknowledging they were doing it), it also came up with a funny new joke about the pointlessness of the whole Green Week stunt, with Kenneth nervously eyeing the all-green peacock logo to his right.
Dr. Spaceman's first appearance of the season (if you don't count his cigarette diet book being shelved near "Dealbreakers") wasn't as deranged and brilliant as some past Chris Parnell guest spots, and I'm wondering if Tracy and Jack's desire for children will last any longer than Liz's baby needs did. But Tracy Jr. was on fire, as usual, and they told us just enough of the Charles Barkley/strip club story to make me, like Frank, really want to know the whole thing. And the increasingly strained nature of the tabloid headlines about the Geiss case was a nice background running gag, until finally the last one had to be explained in print ("a pun on disgrace").
What did everybody else think?