Tag Archives: Wesley Snipes

Season Finale: 30 Rock – “I Do Do”

“I Do Do”

May 20th, 2010

I haven’t written about 30 Rock in a very long time, so you’d think I’d have a lot to say: after all, “I Do Do” actually had a “Previously on 30 Rock” sequence, which is rare on a show that is usually so off-the-wall that it doesn’t need to worry so much about continuity.

However, this was an aggressively plot-heavy conclusion for the series, so it makes sense that we might need a refresher on why Liz is going to three weddings, and why she would go anywhere with Wesley Snipes, and how smart the show was to have Jack dating two celebrity guest stars so that you really don’t know who he’s going to pick. This being said, however, “I Do Do” isn’t really plot-heavy at all – rather, it just sort of revels in the situation that has already been created, introducing new elements and providing conclusions that do a pretty good job of boiling it down to characters.

There are jokes, and there are plots, but even with some fairly ridiculous star power there is no point in time where all of it overwhelms the ways in which the episode plays out as a story about Jack, Liz and Kenneth, which makes it a successful conclusion to both these storylines and the season as a whole.

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30 Rock – “Don Geiss, America and Hope”

“Don Geiss, America and Hope”

March 18th, 2010

I don’t think that “Don Geiss, America and Hope” was a particularly strong 30 Rock episode, but I do think that it was a particularly interesting one. You see, the show displayed three different storytelling methods that it does quite often, each shows both the strengths and weaknesses of the show’s current story model. You have your industry parody (the Comcast buyout of NBC becoming the Kabletown buyout of NBC), you have your celebrity parody (Tracy becoming embroiled in a sex scandal ala Tiger Woods), and then you have the deromanticizing of romantic comedy tropes (Liz’s non-relationship with Wesley Snipes).

In all cases, the show is running into a distinct problem: all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, and the show is starting to become weighed down by this fact. There’s plenty of nice one-liners, and I thought all three of the stories worked sort of well at the end of the day, but these are the same types of stories we’ve seen in the past, and when none of them feel particularly revolutionary and they all appear in the same episode, the show becomes messy more than chaotic, which does little to help the show’s consistency problems.

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