Episode 20 - Cleveland
25 March 2012
Synopsis: Liz and Floyd decide to take a trip to his hometown of Cleveland. When he doesn’t get a promotion at NBC he decides to take a job offer from the top law firm in Cleveland. Tracy’s comeback tour is scuppered by the “Black Crusaders” so he quits TGS and goes into hiding. Jack seems happy with Phoebe but keeps falling asleep. Liz doesn’t trust her and tries to warn Jack that she is a gold digger.
The Good: The three stories were fine for what they are. But they all lost steam pretty quickly and rapidly became a bit clichéd.
Liz and Floyd’s trip to Cleveland had a lot of obvious humour to it. There was nothing wrong with it but the jokes rest entirely on the hilarity of Cleveland being some kind of idyllic getaway. It’s hardly the most preposterous notion in the world and so the humour just seemed a bit too obvious to really get you giggling.
Similarly Tracy Jordan and the Black Crusaders is a witty idea. But it sounds like sketch comedy and not sit comedy. Yes it sounds funny to take the well known black celebrities and invent an imaginary secret code amongst them. But again it’s such an obvious joke. In a sketch you can make these absurd jokes really fun through blatant exaggeration. However that exaggeration grates when you bring it into the real world, which is what 30 Rock is purporting to be.
Phoebe plays her role very well and has a good command of accents. Jack’s narcolepsy seems a sure sign of inner discontent so I assume this story will end next episode.
The Bad: As you can tell from the tone of “The Good” these stories all seem destined for easy resolutions in the season finale which didn’t interest me too much to watch. The most disappointing is Floyd whose story seems over way before it’s time. Already he and Liz are talking about moving in together which again feels very quick. By episodes end it would seem they are going to break up which also seems too quick. Liz finally seemed like a happy normal character and now he will be gone as quick as he arrived. Shame.
The “big” jokes of the episode felt a lot like the Cleveland parody song – obvious and exaggerated. Floyd is sick of the rat race and we jump to seeing an actual rat race. Meh, the context for the metaphorical rat race was too solid for that joke to look anything but very contrived. Then Liz needs an example of an older New York woman looking happy and when she spots one, that woman gets thrown into a pile of garbage by a passer by. And of course Liz and Floyd don’t do anything to help her. It’s not reality and so the humour drains away. This isn’t a sketch show where the context for that joke would have been fine.
Ditto Jenna’s claim that she is Samantha, Phoebe is Charlotte and Liz is the woman at home watching Sex and the City. The context is that Jenna is a little tipsy and looks at Liz as too unsexy to actually qualify to be one of the characters in the show. But you wouldn’t say that to a friend unless it was a mocking joke. Yes that’s Jenna’s character and she is drunk. But she didn’t even pause. She didn’t even think about it, she said it very smoothly, it didn’t seem real. It seemed like an obvious, exaggerated attempt at a punch line.
Comic Highlight: Tracy calls Liz from an unknown location to tell her he has quit the show. “Hello Liz Lemon, it’s me (looks around carefully) Stacy Gordon!” Why is that funny? Because it was timed like a proper joke. The pause allows the audiences mind to conjure up theoretical responses. The punch line is something probably no one thought of because it’s so simple and typically Tracy. He hasn’t thought of a clever way to stay incognito and the result is funny for its lack of imagination.
The Bottom Line: 30 Rock really drifts into sketch comedy here. Which is fine if the context is right. But we are being asked to care about these characters. That’s why Liz is worried about Jack’s marriage. She cares about him and we are supposed to care about their relationship. But it’s difficult to care when exaggeration makes the 30 Rock universe seem so unreal.
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