A quick read that will warm the cockles of most 30 Rock fans for its mere existence, but which has some serious flaws that must be pointed out. With love, truly, because this book clearly was born from love. But still...

First, as with any unauthorised oral history, Mike Roe has had to do the best he can with relatively little. While he managed to track down a cross-section of interviewees, including at least one writer, director, assistant, guest actor, recurring actor, and media commentator, he is (understandably) missing the lead actors, most of the core creative forces, and network representation. As a result, there is a great disparity of knowledge here. Roe has access to the guy who played funny minor character Jeffrey Wienerslav, so we get insights into how he was auditioned, cast, and reused. But he doesn't have access to, say, Kristen Schaal, so her more important character, who brought with her a tonal shift in the program that some fans didn't warm to, and had to respond to that, gets literally a single mention. While you're always going to have to pick and choose, it's a shame he couldn't be as picky as one might have liked. We know a lot about how Scott Adist approached the role of Pete, but almost nothing about Jack McBrayer and Kenneth; Roe has to guess at why Rip Torn's character was killed offscreen but can at least give us insight into why Kathy Geiss pulls a toy car out of her mouth. While we get plenty of good material on how difficult Alec Baldwin was in the early seasons or the challenge of replacing Rachel Dratch with Jane Krakowski in the role of Jenna, because Roe has access to people who were involved in those moments, we understand almost nothing about why Baldwin suddenly loves the show come season six, nor do we ever get a chance to be inside Krakowski's head aside from her crying as they taped the final episodes, because she said so on the DVD commentary.

There's plenty of great material salvaged from these sources, but little more than you could gain yourself. Was the increase in episodes entirely centered around a special guest star at the start of season 3 due to network notes and concerns about falling ratings? We don't know, because no-one from the network or the lead production team is interviewed, so it's mentioned again in one brief comment. Was Schaal's character, Hazel, actually disliked by most viewers, as Roe indicates with his personal opinion, or is this not based on evidence? (I say, as a declared Hazel fan.) Was there discussion about how to portray Kenneth's mum's much vaunted "friend" Ron when he finally appeared in the final season? Were they originally intending Jack to stay with Avery through to the end? Were the production team disappointed not to use Cheyenne Jackson more or was this intentional? (We have his interviews, in which he says that he would've liked to do more; but no-one is available on the other end to provide context.)

I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I reached the Bibliography section. It's a single page with about eight sources, a few of which are just names of publications (e.g. Hollywood Reporter) without specific issues, one of which is the DVDs, and another is the commentaries on those DVDs. If we're honest, Roe has (to his credit) tracked down some important names to interview but then gleaned everything else from publicly available information. Aside from some notes kept by one of the writers from the very first episodes, he has no access to internal network reports or production documentation, which leads to some of the other issues outlined below.

Second, I feel that Roe could have benefitted from a co-author who wasn't so involved in "the biz". While I appreciate many fans of this show will, like me, have a basic understanding of network television production, there are numerous occasions where he rushes through an issue on the assumption that the audience will get it. That we'll know how a table read works, or why episodes can't be given new titles during a writer's strike, for example. Occasionally, too, this foreknowledge is further impeded by the formatting. For example Roe notes how different the show would have been if Michael Schur had ended up producing it, but it takes a couple more pages before he tells us who Michael Schur is. Unless you're in the know, that comment ricochets off the walls and returns to sender.

Third, and I appreciate this will be more contentious, Roe's book is very much of the moment in its approach to progressive identity politics. It’s right that any show should be open to criticism, and Roe does a reasonable job of untangling the threads of some of the jokes that look a little rough in retrospect. And jokes that, as with the two Jenna-wears-blackface jokes, looked pretty unfortunate to me, a white Australian kid in my early ‘20s, at the time. He often successfully navigates the journey of explaining why the jokes were considered funny, whether they worked at the time, and how they’ve been handled since (with some episodes being removed from streaming services as of 2022). Yet just as often his own opinions are pushed through a little too forcefully, dare I say. There are jokes that I think could be debated further – I don’t think most viewers will share Roe’s concern about the many gags clearly satirizing the broadly white male corporate view of the world (even if, yes, they come from a privileged white point-of-view themselves), or the sequence in which Liz hallucinates three Jamaican female nurses in the body of her three ex-boyfriends (I mean, she's hallucinating! They're not supposed to be playing Jamaicans!), or indeed the scene where Jon Hamm is attacked by a white woman’s disembodied hand (which Roe says is “somewhat less offensive” than a scene where it’s a black man’s hand... how a woman's hand could be offensive at all is beyond me). At times, as with the episode where Alec Baldwin’s character is a dead ringer for a Mexican soap opera star, also played by Baldwin in a deliberately cartoonish manner, I suspect no-one outside of the progressive media bubble would even sense a hint of anything evil or ill-intentioned. I appreciate that Roe lives in a different world to me, cares about these issues deeply, and probably felt a great deal of pressure to challenge them, as the book would face issues with reviewers had it not. The difficulty lies partly in the fact that this is the only area where Roe ever pushes back against the show. His authorial voice essentially never intrudes elsewhere, allowing the oral history to function as intended or, at most, allowing that some reviewers felt a certain season wasn't as good as the previous one but never indicating that he feels it doesn't work himself. So the fact that he's pushing his own angle here, often supported only by other TV commentators or a junior member of the crew, feels out of place in a book where he so resolutely refuses to offer opinions elsewhere. For my part, as one of the interviewees notes on this issue, we can't accurately view these episodes' content now, as we're in the middle of a zeitgeisty re-reckoning of identity. After a few decades we will be able to see these episodes in the light of their time, as we do now with “edgy” comedies from the past like All in the Family. I would have liked to have heard, for example, what the various black cast members thought about some of the race jokes. It’s interesting, too, that race is the focus of 90% of the complaints. While he very briefly touches on fat people and queer culture, Roe largely brushes jokes about them aside. Elsewhere he raises no qualms about actors playing the mentally ill (think Liz's brother), the physically disabled, or those with other mental health issues, even when he actively notes that Kathy Geiss' character is based on the actually autistic Temple Grandin, and yet is the focus of jokes for her all-out weirdness. (And that's leaving aside the jokes about child sex predators and much else!) Besides which, it's frustrating that Roe calls for more diversity on the program but then completely ignores or brushes over those occurrences: no references to the storyline in which Liz's gay cousin visits NYC or Tracy engages with an older black actress playing his mum who has clearly had a tough career; very little focus on Queen Latifah as a black congresswoman pushing for more diversity on the show-within-the-show; and Salma Hayek's fantastic recurring character basically gets dismissed for having an accent (despite being an immigrant) with nothing more apparently needing to be said on the matter. While he mentions that someone online found Margaret Cho's performance as Kim Jong-il "minstrelsy", it's clear that Cho doesn't feel that way, so I'm not even sure the criticism is valid - or at least it could've been delved into a bit further. Roe seems to enjoy edgy comedy, or he could not claim this as one of his favourite programs, but only when it's on his terms. There are clearly jokes on the program that won't sit well with future generations and a few that went too far, but Roe's level of investment in policing jokes is not on par with the expectations of most TV viewers. (Late in the book he notes that one of Fey's follow-up shows, Mr Mayor, had a suitably diverse cast but its "two leads" were white, which he sees as shameful. As someone who loved that show, I'm not sure I even accept the argument. The two "big name" actors in the cast were white, true, but the Liz Lemons of the program were undoubtedly those played by Vella Lovell and Mike Cabellon, both non-white.)

On its own, I would have no problem with this, but - as I said - it's the only thing that Roe analyses in great critical detail. As the book goes on and his sources grow dimmer, a palpable laziness kicks in. By season six he is often just writing out a plot synopsis of a given episode and recounting particular jokes. While it's nice to know that Paula Leggett Chase took pole dancing lessons before playing Randi in the reality TV episodes, or that Elaine Stritch was mean to some directors, I'd like to know more about whether the show felt that doing a second reality TV episode felt like going back to the same well, or why Stritch kept coming back to the program. When a commentator (not involved in making the program) notes that the character of Angie Jordan may be a stereotypical black woman, I wanted insight from Sherri Shepherd or Tracy Morgan or at least someone who wrote for the character, but the moment merely passes by. Sometimes he literally just provides a paragraph summarising a funny plot from an episode, but in a manner that removes all the juice from the humour. These sections drag because I can't imagine a non-fan would get this far into the book, and thus I don't understand whom the listing of funny jokes could be for?

It didn't surprise me to learn that this book essentially originated from an online oral history Roe wrote about the making of one of the novelty songs from an early episode. This is a show that deserves to be venerated, and that certainly deserves to have its flaws called out too. Yet this may have worked better as a series of blog articles, in which the author's penchant for spotlighting his core concerns and favourite moments, and his inability to get to the heart of much else, would have been less exasperating.

But I liked it. ( )

Essentially a long long long blogpost about 30 Rock, and sucker for 30 Rock that I am, I ate it right up. Frequently, it was just a recap of the episode, but once again, I ate it right up. I've watched 30 Rock so many times and still have not tired of it. I love to watch it, listen to it, read about it.

In this book, they talked about how 30 Rock dated itself very quickly with its references, unlike all the other series which are apparently timeless comfort watches. However, my experiences have been the opposite. I've found new things to enjoy every time I watch 30 Rock, and it feels more fresher and timeless than its contemporaries to me. Cynically, the characters themselves are awful enough that real world happenings involving the cast haven't put me off of the show itself (and if anything, confirms the accuracy of their deeply flawed characterisations!)

All this is to say, this is probably not for someone with only a passing liking to 30 Rock. Not that I'm being a snob, as if this were a deep cut or something. More like, this is a mid-to-low superficial analysis of the history of the show, so much that its flaws are less forgiving to anyone looking to learn more about the show. It is a perfect gift, being something that I would love to read (and did love to read!) but would not have bought myself.

What I would really want one day is my own copy of the entire script of the show for me to annotate throughout, a la people annotating Ulysses of something.

An interesting note of me reading this is I was also listening to the Robert Smigel episode of CONAF. The commonalities, specifically of the struggles of a fledgling show constantly on the verge of cancellation and the ridiculously late nights to create something so evergreen, really elevated each other. Would highly recommend as companion pieces.