Last week, I praised 30 Rock for its wealth of material, a compliment that College may have proved to have been a bit premature. This week’s episode borrows its first storyline from season one’s The C Word and flimsily spins another from an old one-liner that ends up delivering about one line’s worth of laughs. It was one of Jack’s crisis weeks. Every so often in 30 Rock, Jack loses his glossy, controlled demeanour and we catch a glimpse of the seething mass of doubt and insecurity that lies underneath the Armani. In the past these crises have set up some weird and wonderful punch lines: Jack cradling a fresh peacock corpse and stealing deli meat with an Eastern European prostitute were brilliant pay offs to crisis stories about losing his mentor and finalising his divorce. The crisis this week? Jack being unable to leave 25 years of Microwave Programming behind him as the Kabletown merger looms into view. And the pay off? Pete in a Mexican poncho strumming along to Jack’s drunken rendition of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung… Enjoyable yes, but it’s no dead peacock. There was a welcome return from writers Toofer, Frank and Lutz who channelled their own student days by getting up to their usual monkeyshines and pranking Pete into ponchodom. A worrying trend in this season of 30 Rock has been Jenna’s steady transformation into becoming the voice of reason. Sacrificing her own ambition for the good of the show in episode one, leading an expedition to moral high ground in Brooklyn Without Limits, and this week sagely advising Liz to make peace with her rule-enforcing status, Jenna is showing all the signs of turning into an actual adult human being. Let’s hope it’s just a side effect of some illegal Brazilian diet pills… You can read our review of episode 7, Brooklyn Without Limits, here. Follow Den Of Geek on Twitter right here.
