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kottke.org posts about 30 Rock

How the 30 Rock sausage is made

This long four-part interview of 30 Rock show runner Robert Carlock at the AV Club is, as mentioned, long but worth reading if you’re into TV or 30 Rock. Part one covers season one & and part of two, and part two walks us through part of season two & season three.

[Jerry Seinfeld’s] people and NBC were talking at a very high level about promoting Bee Movie, and they were encouraging us to use him. We were really eager to do anything we could to continue our life writing the show, in part, at that point, because we’d really fallen in love with writing it. I will never have another opportunity to write for those people again. Writing a half-hour for Alec Baldwin is insane. And to work with Tina. A lot of the things this show has done, like product integration and guest stars, is partly to give NBC the fewest number of excuses possible to get rid of us. If they’re saying, “We’ll promote you. Have Seinfeld on,” and we all love Seinfeld, we’ll sit down and try to find a way to do it on our terms-much like product integration, where every time we’ve done it, we’ve had the luxury of being able to call it out or mock it or integrate it. This past live show had a couple of P.I. things in it, because that was so much about television that you’re able to do it. We were happy to have Jerry come on the show, and he shot 10 pages in a very long day. We usually shoot six or seven pages, so it was a real burden.

Parts three & four to come. (via @khoi)


Cookie Monster wants to host SNL

Here’s his audition video:

Fantastic idea…I would love to see a Saturday Night Live with Sesame Street characters. Hey, if 30 Rock is really The Muppet Show


Liz Lemon flashback collection

I wonder if they’ll ever do a flashback where Liz is heavier (as Fey once was).


Live 30 Rock Episode

In case you missed it on Friday, NBC announced that the October 14th episode of 30 Rock will be performed live. In fact, they’ll be performing 2 shows, one for the East Coast and one for the West Coast. (Pro tip: Air the opposite coast’s episode before the next week’s show.) I am, of course, excited to see the Tracy Morgan/Tracy Jordan combo live.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry for Live Television is jam packed with interesting nuggets such as an incomplete list of notable live television episodes (West Wing, 2005. ER, 1997). Also, the last scripted series to “do it live” regularly was Roc in 1992.


30 Rock = The Muppet Show rebooted

I’ve never seen 30 Rock (I KNOW, I KNOW) so I can’t attest to the correctness of this, but supposedly the show is a rip-off of The Muppet Show.

EXHIBIT B: LIZ LEMON VS. KERMIT THE FROG
Both are the most normal characters on their respective shows. Both are unlucky at love. Both are neurotic worrywarts and type-a personalities who slow burn into a crazy breakdown once per episode. AND both have some kind of flirtation with the guest stars that ultimately goes nowhere. There is absolutely no difference between Liz Lemon and Kermit the Frog save for genitalia (Liz is a lady, Kermit has none).

Make up your mind, internet. Is Kermit Liz Lemon or Christian Bale?

Update: Sesame Street did a 30 Rock bit. Liz Lemon was played not by Kermit but by a lemon. (thx, elisabeth)


How Alec Baldwin channels his rage

Alec Baldwin must relish the opportunity to channel his rage through Jack Donaghy, the beloved heartless media executive he plays on 30 Rock, a rage in evidence at The Huffington Post in his open-skewering of the suits who own and run his show’s network.

On the problem of the studios in the ongoing WGA negotiations:

They are owned by huge, creativity-deadening corporations and operated by lawyers and marketing executives who lord over the worst creative decline I have witnessed in a long time, particularly in films. In television, companies like GE view properties like NBC the way realtors view square footage. GE does not care what is on NBC. So long as the programming is relatively inoffensive, they want to earn as much per square foot as they can.

I missed this at the time, but 30 Rock snuck in a last-minute subversive writers’ strike joke for its last pre-strike show.

For some defictionalized 30 Rock goods, t-shirts for the parent company of 30 Rock’s NBC, Sheinhardt Wig Company, can be had here.

(via glass shallot)