Day Two Hundred and Eleven - 30 Rock: Season 1, Pilot, "Well, I laughed..."

...but I honestly don't get what the hubbub was over this series.

The opening bit with the hotdogs/Rhoda-themesong was equal parts brilliant and wretched. Pretty much the same thing could be said about the rest of the episode (or, at least, the major set pieces). Mixed in with the vapidness are occasional moments of genius.

It makes me very angry... because I have to suffer through that vapidness to get to the genius.

I feel like that shouldn't be the point. That genius should always be striven for (striven? strove?) not this base mixture of the two, even if one is there to obviously highlight the other through satire.

I feel bad only half-liking this show. Partially because Tina Fey is awesome (and darling, but mostly the awesome), but also because if I don't say I'm instantly in love with it, I feel like I'm stupid and missing something, which seems to be the case.

I must be missing something. Because I'm stupid. That's the only explanation... because otherwise I'm just another arrogant television critic who's lost the point.

That said, yes, Alec Baldwin is excellent in his smarm, the writers are exactly as I envisioned them (I even saw a thinner, less desperate version of me), and I cannot imagine why Jack McBrayer hasn't played a grown up version of Moral Oral yet (Dino, maybe you could get on that?).

Maybe it just takes some getting used to... some settling time as, sure, this was the pilot and often pilots have a certain amount of cooling off before all the actors gel together and the show really gets off the ground.

I'm going to hope that's the case because there's plenty of excellent, subtle comedy in this show. It's just that, from this small example, I'm having a hard time understanding why it got seven seasons while Better Off Ted got cut short with one and a half.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~