Overthinking It tackles the all-important question that consumes many of my politically astute friends who are also fans of “30 Rock”: where does the show’s politics lay? (They also recently had me on as a guest podcast panel member again, always fun.) On its surface, “30 Rock” seems liberal, but if you’re a fan who watches every episode, you start to get the creeping feeling that the show endorses reactionary politics. Mlawski marshals the evidence: Liz isn’t as liberal as she seems, Jack usually wins, the show did that unforgiveable and “South Park"-esque episode taking a shot at affirmative action. I’ve personally wrestled with this question repeatedly. Is the show trenchant liberal satire, or is it so puffed up with wealthy privilege that they’re starting to drift into apologies for weird conservative politics? But reading the Overthinking It piece, I realized that the answer is simple: Neither. The show isn’t liberal or conservative so much as it’s cynical.
Before I make the case as to why I believe this, let me explain why I think it’s easy to want to believe the show has a consistent political outlook. Mainly, it’s because it traffics in edgy political humor. Every episode pushes the political line on things like neoconservatism, red/blue culture wars, feminism, race issues, and even environmentalism. And sometimes it engages in overt satire. Because of this, I think our tendency as an audience is to want to see “30 Rock” promoting a coherent political ideology, a “moral” to the story, as it were. Indeed, that’s what Mlawski touches on in his post:
If Liz were the main character of almost any other program on the air, we’d expect her to be the stand-in for the show’s writers, used the same way Seth McFarlane uses Brian on Family Guy to espouse his (usually) liberal politics and the same way Trey Parker and Matt Stone use Stan and Kyle on South Park to espouse their (usually) libertarian politics. And we’d be forgiven for making such an assumption. After all, Liz Lemon is played by and clearly based on Tina Fey, the show’s creator and head writer.
It’s true that “Family Guy” and “South Park” are responsible for creating the assumption that there’s a moral to the story in our politically charged comedy. And fuck them for it, honestly. The worst parts of “South Park” are when the characters start channeling the writers spouting brainless libertarian pieties. That these guys have lowered the bar in what we expect from comedy isn’t Tina Fey’s fault. And I commend her for doing something more daring and interesting than simply building the show around a character who is rewarded for having the “correct” political worldview. The more I think about it, in fact, the more I think “30 Rock” works on a more interesting satirical level than comedy shows where being right means being rewarded, or where main characters act as a mouthpiece for political rants.
To really understand what’s going on with “30 Rock”, you have to accept two of the show’s most basic premises fully: 1) Liz is a fuck-up and 2) Jack is a master of a world created by people like him for people like him. These two facts are unrelated in a causal way, but they do go a long way to explaining the characters’ very believable friendship. More importantly, they explain why it’s both true that Jack is always right and in control, and yet the moral center of the show is still (mostly) liberal.
Let’s start with #1. Liz is undeniably a fuck-up in most ways, except that she has a very narrow talent for running a crappy variety comedy show. Over the course of the show, we’ve learned that Liz is lazy, a glutton, anti-social, a bully, insecure, prone to fantasies, and emotionally screwed up to the point where she can’t have normal relationships. These facts have caused some feminists to bunch up, but I’m pretty happy overall with it. If we don’t want women relegated to window dressing in comedy, they have to play deeply flawed characters, because comedy is built around laughing at deeply flawed people navigate the world, making light of our own flaws and making us feel superior. Liz is a lot like George on “Seinfeld” in that way. I’m ecstatic to see women occupying comic roles that were previously reserved for men. Amy Poehler is doing something similar on “Parks and Recreation”, and if you aren’t watching that show, shame on you. It’s the funniest thing on TV right now.