30 Rock: Complexity, Metareferentiality and the Contemporary Quality Sitcom Katrin Horn When the sitcom 30 Rock first aired in 2006 on NBC, the odds were against a renewal for a second season. Not only was it pitched against another new show with the same “behind the scenes”-idea, namely the drama series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. 30 Rock’s often absurd storylines, obscure references, quick- witted dialogues, and fast-paced punch lines furthermore did not make for easy consumption, and thus the show failed to attract a sizeable amount of viewers. While Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip did not become an instant success either, it still did comparatively well in the Nielson ratings and had the additional advantage of being a drama series produced by a household name, Aaron Sorkin1 of The West Wing (NBC, 1999-2006) fame, at a time when high-quality prime-time drama shows were dominating fan and critical debates about TV. Still, in a rather surprising programming decision NBC cancelled the drama series, renewed the comedy instead and later incorporated 30 Rock into its Thursday night line-up2 called “Comedy Night Done Right.”3 Here the show has been aired between other single-camera-comedy shows which, like 30 Rock, 1 | Aaron Sorkin has aEntwurf short cameo in “Plan B” (S5E18), in which he meets Liz Lemon as they both apply for the same writing job: Liz: Do I know you? Aaron: You know my work. Walk with me. I’m Aaron Sorkin. The West Wing, A Few Good Men, The Social Network. Liz: Studio 60? Aaron: Shut up. 2 | The show’s time slot has changed repeatedly, which has been criticized among others by Alec Baldwin. 3 | Until then, Thursday Night had been advertised as “Must See TV” from the 1990s onwards, featuring hit sitcoms like Friends (1994-2004), Frasier (1993-2004), and Seinfeld (1989-1998). 154 Katrin Horn experiment with the sitcom format as well as TV’s potential for self-reflexivity.4 Now ending its seventh and final season, 30 Rock is still far from reaching the kind of audience attracted to CBS’ top-billing multi-camera-sitcoms Two and a Half Men (2003-) or How I Met Your Mother (2005-). Yet, as a critics’ favorite with several awards and countless nominations, a small but devoted fan base, and a steady flow of blogs and magazine articles dedicated to the show (and in particular its creator and female lead Tina Fey), 30 Rock’s success lies less in reestablishing the rating hits of NBC’s “Must See TV”-era and instead stems from its ability to bring NBC (and its viewers) the kind of prestige associated with ‘quality TV.’ Robert Thompson claims the term “has come to be associated in the minds of many with the ‘quality drama’” (1997: 17), such as The Sopranos (1999-2007), Mad Men (2007-), Lost (2004-2010) or The Wire (2002-2008). ‘Quality TV,’ however, has first been introduced long before the current trend of cable dramas with cinematic aesthetics and ‘edgy’ topics like mafia bosses, serial murders, and 60s sexism. Rather, as Jane Feuer has argued, it was first used to describe the comedy shows of production company MTM, and here most notably The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). According to Feuer one of the signs of quality TV products introduced in The Mary Tyler Moore Show is the planned finale – perfected by Seinfeld (Morreale 2000), and now, if the reviews are to believed, revived by 30 Rock. The series is the first sitcom in a long time which had an opportunity to orchestrate its final season leading up to a final episode that satisfied fans as well as critics. The episode also pays homage to two famous finale moments from influential MTM productions: the snow globe of St. Elsewhere5 and the structure of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The latter in particular is noteworthy not only for revolutionizing the serial capacity (rather than episodic dimension) and political relevancy of the sitcom, but also because it paid tribute to newly developed research methods concerning audience demographics. The result was that networks decided that shows which reached a niche rather than mass audience could still be profitable, as long as those audiences were, as Brower puts it, sufficiently dedicated, educated and affluent, and thus in themselvesEntwurf a “quality product” to advertisers (2001: 165).6 I argue that 30 Rock, which references several other key aspects of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, follows this tradition and is consciously constructed 4 | Originally Scrubs (2001-2010) and The Office (2005-). 5 | After a successful run over several seasons, the hospital series St. Elsewhere alienated fans and critics alike in its finale, when the cut to a snow globe revealed that its events and protagonists had only been the imagination of a child with brain damage. 6 | The same observation was made more recently by Jason Mittell. He claims that one reason for the existence of “complex TV” is that “programs with comparatively small ratings can provide lucrative results for the industry under their recalibrated new measures” (“Complexity on Context,” par. 28). 30 Rock: Complexity, Metareferentiality and the Contemporary Quality Sitcom 155 as a ‘quality sitcom’ which addresses ‘quality audiences.’ While the show, whose ratings never went above nine million and averaged between three and six million viewers,7 has garnered its share of “best show”-articles,8 I will use the term “quality sitcom,” as Jane Feuer suggested, as a descriptive, rather than evaluative term in order to illuminate the show’s status and concept (2007: 148). I will illustrate how 30 Rock unites the characteristics of the ‘original’ MTM quality products with current characteristics of quality such as televisuality (Caldwell) and complex narration (Mittell), and how the show moreover incorporates a TV genre hitherto excluded from the quality discourse, the sketch show, to further enhance its topicality and metareferentiality. The latter refers to self-reflexive jokes about The Girlie Show which extend to an ongoing commentary on 30 Rock, NBC and TV more generally, and thus from “artefact to the entire system of […] media” (Wolf 2009: 31). According to Werner Wolf, who coined the term, meta-references serve to make mediality itself visible. They allow audiences to reflect on the product’s medial status at the time of consumption (28). Michael Dunne argues that such highly reflexive elements in popular culture have shifted away “from the artists’ self-expression and toward an affirmation of the mediated community that is embracing both creator and audience” (1992: 11) due to audiences’ increasing familiarity with media structures and their heightened every-day immersion in media products. Similarly, Scott Olson claims that “meta-television,” as he calls it, is the “cultural expression of creators and consumers who are bored with and feel restricted by television’s naturalism and who resist meaning through illogic, irrationality, unreality, nonsequitur, and incoherence” (1987: 298). Hence, these complex mechanisms make 30 Rock more rather than less attractive to specific audiences, who are willing to engage with a show that combines such disparate elements as complex narration and sketch show segmentation, as well as the cinematography of ‘quality TV’ with the grotesque aesthetics of the variety show relying Entwurfon visual puns and gag costumes. 7 | For comparison: The Big Bang Theory, which for a time aired during the same Thursday 8pm timeslot as 30 Rock, came close to 20 million viewers in January 2013. 8 | See for example Jesse David Fox’ “Why 30 Rock was the best comedy of 2011- 2012 season” at Splitsider.com (http://splitsider.com/2012/05/why-30-rock-was-the- best-show-of-2011-2012-season/) or the Guardian-article “30 Rock is the Best show on Television” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/2008/feb/07/30 rockisthebestshowonte). 156 Katrin Horn THE SITCOM: RESURRECTION VIA REFLEXIVITY While 30 Rock is in many regards singular concerning its style as well as content and narration, it does not exist in a genre-vacuum. The sitcom as a whole has been snubbed stylistically (“zero degree style”) as well as ideologically (“conservative”), yet some shows nevertheless managed to garner critical acclaim and dedicated fans due to their penchant for self-reflexivity and willingness to verge from genre norms: first and foremost Seinfeld (NBC, 1989- 1998), later followed by Arrested Development (Fox, 2003-2006) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000-2012). More recently, single-camera-comedy shows which refrain from using a laugh-track such as Community (2009-), Modern Family (2009-), and Parks and Recreation (2009-) have further reinvigorated the genre, representing what Jeremy G. Butler has described as the “resurrection of the sitcom in the 2000s” (2009: 173). Among the most recent examples of the resurrection trend, all taken from NBC’s “Comedy Night Done Right,” which have exhibited inventive approaches to the sitcom genre, both Modern Family and Parks and Recreation have to varying degrees adopted the mockumentary style made famous by The Office. 30 Rock and Community, in contrast, distinguish themselves from more traditional sitcoms by their metareferentiality and a media-awareness which goes beyond mockumentary’s direct address. On Community, this meta- sensibility is mainly created by the character of Abed, who constantly relates the series’ events to iconic movies and TV shows, as well as by repetitive tropes and media practices. 30 Rock, on the other hand, in addition to the often self- conscious commentary by its protagonists, emphasizes its connection to the live-tradition of TV9 comedy found in earlier sitcoms and sketch shows, which broadens the opportunities for metareferentiality. 9 | Brett Mills in particular stresses the centrality of “liveness” to an understanding of the sitcom and points out the central role singular live episodes play for usually taped shows.