Insomnia: An Ode to 30 Rock

Originally published October 21, 2017

The monsters at Netflix have removed 30 Rock from streaming. I am literally losing sleep over it. 

For four years, until the beginning of October, I fell asleep to the crackling rhythm of Tina Fey's jokes: to Alec Baldwin saying "Good God, Lemon," to Tracy Morgan singing "werewolf bar mitzvah," and Jane Krakowski singing, "Muffin Top." 

Sometimes I would pick an episode at random, or cycle through the seasons, but I had specific episodes that became like bedtime stories to me. I drifted off to the familiar sounds of Steve Martin saying "I miscounted the men, Liz!" in his guest appearance as Gavin Veloure, the con-man in love with Liz Lemon, and James Franco playing a version of himself who enlisted Jenna to be his fake girlfriend so that the media wouldn't find out about his sexual relationship with a body pillow. I particularly liked the episode called "Florida," in the final season, so that I could hear Liz and Jack fight as they stayed in his late mother's condo, and hear Alec Baldwin say, "I'm not going to fight in bed with a woman I'm not even having sex with!"

I am not going to argue that this is healthy for my sleep or sanity. I even suspect that while my love for 30 Rock is deeper than ever, it has lost some of the magic it once held for me. I first watched it my sophomore year of college: sitting cross-legged on my twin bed, shoveling take-out dining hall food into my mouth, doing Liz Lemon proud. I'm surprised I didn't choke; I didn't know TV could be that funny. But as it has become less of a show I watch, and more of a song I listen to to fall asleep, I miss some of the humor. When I do actually watch it with my eyes, I see that half the jokes are visual. It reminds me to put my phone down when I'm watching something new. How can my refreshed Facebook feed be better than a well-timed visual gag? 

I am also not going to argue that it is a perfect show. Perfection, of course, is not something any piece of art can actually achieve, since everyone's ideas about it are different. Subjectivity is inescapable and necessary to the creation of art. But it has flaws: some of the jokes about race and gender seem dated, especially in the earlier seasons, and I am embarrassed that I didn't notice, on the first watch, the transphobic jokes that make me cringe now. Tina Fey's joke-telling, while undeniably brilliant, occasionally falls into the tone-deaf offensive category that many comedy writers laud as "risky" and "brave." I, personally, find it distasteful. I know that a show can be absurdly funny (see Liz Lemon's online date from K-Date, the dating section of the Kraft Foods website), without belittling those whose differences you don't understand. The later seasons suffer from the classic sitcom problem of characters becoming parodies of themselves. The earned emotional ties of their relationships begin to crack as the writers stuff more outrageous jokes into their dialogue, looking to keep the punchy comedic energy of the earlier seasons going. The show picks up again in its last season, the jokes clipping along at the rhythm established solidly in the beginning, and the characters growing in appealing but not unbelievable ways. Liz Lemon gets married in a Princess Leia costume, and Jack invents clear dishwashers. All is right in its world. 

As I fall asleep, I think about the unlucky people of the past. How miserable to have to lay in the dark, listening to your own brain, waiting for the mercy of sleep. I think about people like Edgar Allen Poe. I hope, for his sake, that he had something fun to read before bed, some kind of comedy or erotica. Did he fall asleep to images of vampiric women crawling their way out of graves, or to disembodied teeth tapping at his window? If I lay in silence at night my mid veers from the shame over the stupid thing I said to a friend in high school, to the way I mishandled rejection in college, to the horrific thing I read in the news that day. What violence will befall those I love? Will we survive that earthquake that's coming for the Pacific Northwest any day now? How close to the death of democracy are we really? How likely is that Nuclear war? I turn on 30 Rock, and my mind gets lost in the dulcet tones of Liz Lemon ordering a meatball sub with extra bread.