IT TOOK THREE SEASONS TO FIGURE THAT OUT?:

I Want To GOP to There: 30 Rock's weird conservative streak. (Jonah Weiner, May 6, 2009, Slate)

The show's central tension remains the tug of war between Fey's Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy. Their head butting doubles as an argument about the viability of liberal ideals and the allure of a pragmatic, colder-eyed conservatism—and it's remarkable how often the show sides with the latter.

The terms of the debate are established in the pilot. Whereas Jack is a wealthy dater of models with an arsenal of problem-management skills honed over decades of corporate retreats, Liz has only a checking account to her name and clings to a fantasy of presexual, junk-food-munching adolescence. Jack adores the political right for its merciless expedience—he fires Liz's longtime producer, Pete, without a blink—while Liz's liberalism is presented as another symptom of her prolonged adolescence. "Lemon," a stupefied Jack asks later in the season, "what happened in your childhood to make you think that people are good?"

Beyond the comedic possibilities of such an odd couple, what's the show getting at here? In one light, Liz's self-infantilizing might reflect an urge toward equality: The man-child is a venerable comic tradition, from The Jerk to Billy Madison to everything Will Ferrell does, and 30 Rock proves that an eternal 13-year-old tomboy—scared of sex, obsessed with Star Wars and meatball subs—can be just as funny as her male counterpart. It might reflect an ethos of resistance, too: Liz, fearing that she's a brunette caught in a blonde's game, incapable of (and feeling icky about) using her sexuality to get ahead the way her friend Jenna Maroney does, tries to drop out of the race altogether, to barricade herself in a world where wheels of cheese, not sex, wealth, and power, are the brass rings.

But Liz's would-be adolescent paradise—and, with it, her liberal-feminist instincts—is ultimately cast as a neurosis she needs to escape, lest she die alone and unloved in her apartment, choking on a sandwich.

All you needed to know is that it's funny to know it's conservative.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2009 1:23 PM