Do Not Adjust Your Set

By James Poniewozik

Tina Fey, formerly of Saturday Night Live, is in the midst of a major career change, one that has taken her from a late-night writers' room to, um, a late-night writers' room. On her sitcom 30 Rock, she plays Liz Lemon, head writer of The Girlie Show, a decently rated, woman-oriented sketch show. Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), an executive at NBC's corporate parent General Electric who made his career selling GE ovens, decides it needs more male viewers. So he forces Liz to hire Tracy Jordan (SNL alum Tracy Morgan), a wild and (literally) crazy comic who has starred in such Wayansesque hit movies as Who Dat Ninja? and Black Cop, White Cop ("One does the duty. One gets the booty"). Soon the show has been retitled TGS with Tracy Jordan, and Liz is left running a hit show that she's not sure is really hers.

On the sitcom, Liz is at odds with her boss. In real life, Fey agrees with what NBC says about 30 Rock, which she also writes and produces. First, even though the network has a second fall debut--Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, from The West Wing's creator, Aaron Sorkin--about a sketch-comedy show, neither series is about that other marquee NBC property, SNL. (Of course not. I'll assume they're about Mad TV.) Second, neither is in competition with the other. "I'm pretty sure we can never be on at the same time," Fey says dryly. "They're a drama. We're a comedy. We're different."

Well, kind of. The pilot of 30 Rock (Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.; debuts Oct. 11) has a scene in which the writers challenge an actor to do impressions--Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano. "There's a new promo [for Studio 60] that NBC showed me," Fey says, "and someone in it was saying, 'Show me your Tom Cruise.' I said, 'Oh! I guess there is a little overlap.'"

Radio humorist Fred Allen famously said that imitation is the sincerest form of television. But usually it's different networks doing the imitating. How did NBC get two shows in the same unusual milieu in the same season? Apparently by coincidence. Fey, who had a four-year development deal with NBC, first pitched the network a sitcom about cable news. Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, felt Fey was using the news setting as a fig leaf for her own experience and encouraged her to write what she knew. Sorkin, meanwhile, was shopping his return to TV with a show about TV--a topic that earned him high praise, if not high ratings, with ABC's Sports Night. SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels, a co--executive producer of 30 Rock, says Fey's sitcom was in the works when Sorkin asked to tour the SNL set for research. "I honestly believe he came to his decision separately," Michaels says.

NBC and both series' makers don't like the shows to be compared--the producers of Studio 60 refused to be interviewed for this article for that reason. And on the one hand, they have a point. The shows have different formats. (Helpful mnemonic: the one with 30 in the title is half an hour; the one with 60, an hour.) They have different tones: 30 Rock lampoons all its characters, even Liz, while Sorkin, as Michaels says with understatement, "tends to write in a more heroic mode." It's not a zero-sum game; as Reilly notes, "If these were two cop shows, we wouldn't even be having this conversation." On the other hand, come on. Any person not employed by GE is reasonably going to ask whether he or she wants to watch both shows.

In fact, looking at how two smart writers approach similar settings and conflicts is a study in how to deal with ideas on TV. Start with Studio 60 (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.), which is all about Big Important Subjects. Whither television? Whither social discourse? Whither this red-blue divided nation? The producer (Judd Hirsch) of Studio 60--the long-running sketch-show-within-a-show--is forced to kill a controversial sketch about Christians. He goes all Network on his network, launching an on-air tirade about how gutless corporations are "lobotomizing" America. (If there's no two-minute-plus speech, it ain't a Sorkin show.) After he is fired, the new network president (Amanda Peet) persuades former Studio 60 writers Matt Albie (Matthew Perry) and Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford) to take over and revitalize the show. Complicating their job are a meddling corporate boss (Steven Weber), Danny's announcement that he tested positive for cocaine and Matt's history with star Harriet Hayes (Sarah Paulson), a born-again Christian he broke up with because she appeared on The 700 Club. (Sorkin, who has had drug run-ins and dated devout Christian and West Wing actress Kristin Chenoweth, is also writing what he knows.)

As always, Sorkin proves he can make dialogue skip rope. When a detractor calls Matt and Danny "Barbra Streisand--loving," Matt asks, "Was she calling us Hollywood liberals, or was she calling us gay?" Danny: "It's a fine distinction." Perry and Whitford have fantastic chemistry; squabbling but loyal, Matt and Danny are like a long-married couple but with more passion. (The women characters are much weaker: Harriet is a pretty billboard who serves as the token religious voice, while Peet drifts through with weird detachment, as if she were playing the princess of a small country.) And some details are spot-on: one invented sketch, "Peripheral Vision Man," is a dead ringer for the kind of lame skits that have long plagued SNL. I mean Mad TV.

In terms of craft, Studio 60 is very good. Sorkin is probably incapable of writing a bad show. But self-satisfied, self-serious and self-congratulatory--that he can do. From the mood lighting and stirring music to the hot-button story lines to the characters' arias on the august legacy of their show, Sorkin makes running a comedy program seem like negotiating an arms treaty. Is your beef with sketch shows that they used to be daring social critiques--("Chizzburger! Chizzburger!")--or that they used to make you laugh? Worse, Studio 60 fails to show us that Matt and Danny are actually funny. (Witty, yes, but so was President Bartlet.) In Episode 2, Matt has to come up with a knock-'em-dead opening sketch for his first show. His idea is--wait for it--a Pirates of Penzance parody. Studio 60 treats it like comic genius.

You might assume that 30 Rock, the sitcom, is the more lightweight show. But Fey began comedy writing with Chicago's Second City troupe, where, she says, "your starting place was always current events and social issues." Her hit movie Mean Girls was a mainstream feminist entertainment that was steeped in ideas but not overwhelmed by them. And 30 Rock is at heart about the race-class-gender triangle among its three leads: Liz, a talented but headstrong woman; Jack, a conservative suit who's not as dumb as Liz wishes he were; and Tracy, a loony--but cannily so--black celebrity who came from nothing.

But it's socially conscious second. First, it's funny. In the pilot (being reshot in parts for recasting), Jack sizes up Liz instantly, with creepy accuracy: "New York, third-wave feminist, college educated, single and pretending to be happy about it, overscheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that has 'Healthy Body Image' on the cover, and every two years you take up knitting for--a week." In a brilliant bonding scene, Tracy takes Liz to a strip club and says she could learn from the dancers: "They know the window of opportunity's only open for a moment." Liz stuffs a bill into a persistent stripper's stocking, protesting, "This is for computer classes."

30 Rock is willing to let each of its characters be right and wrong; it's confident that we don't need to worship them to like them. And for all the show's cartooniness, its gender-conscious take on the TV business is actually more sophisticated. Sure, networks occasionally interfere with shows for political reasons. But more often, they do so for demographic reasons. Or for no reason. "Sometimes," Jack boasts, "you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own."

Which is not to say 30 Rock is cynical. But where Studio 60 reveres television, 30 Rock loves TV, and that makes the difference. At one point in Studio 60, the show's director cracks a joke that a stressed-out Danny fails to appreciate. Says the director: "It's a comedy show, dude." Good thing somebody remembers that.