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Scanner
by Sarah Hepola
Today on Hooksexup's sex and culture blog: For the Vincents of today and yesteryear, it's marry, fuck, or kill time. |
The Screengrab
by Bilge Ebiri
Today on Hooksexup's film blog: Crazy physics in the movies, and writhing French females. Plus: 5 movies about capitalism gone wild. |
Weekend
by George Pitts
/photography/ |
Sex Advice from . . . Lesbian Oil Wrestlers
by Katie Liederman
Q: Any suggestions for food in the bedroom?
A: Slap her with some barbequed seitan strips. |
Film Reviews
by Various
The latest Frank Miller adaptation, 300 seems awfully familiar; The Namesake is Mira Nair's best; The Host is a must-see. |
Californication
by Joey Rubin
Jane Smiley on her explicit new novel, Ten Days in the Hills. /books/ |
Miss Information
by Erin Bradley
So many women, so few decision-making skills. /advice/ |
Sex After Not Seeing Each Other for a Few Days
by Tao Lin
"Matt wants to have sex with her face and body, but with a penis the size of Rachel's face and body, shaped so it fits her like a mold." /fiction/ |
Into the Woods
by Sean Moeller
Unraveling the mystery of Deerhoof with guitarist John Dieterich. /music/ |
Don't Tell Me
by Kai Ma
Some couples say that when it comes to sleeping around, ignorance is bliss. /dispatches/ |
Bad Sex With Ondine Galsworth
by Ondine Galsworth
The summer of my sexually ambiguous boyfriend. /regulars/ |
Horoscopes
by Neal Medlyn
Libra: Don't be surprised if you go from excited to regretful in the time it takes to unzip someone's pants. /advice/ |
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 couple of years ago at an awards luncheon, I saw Tina Fey deliver the best acceptance speech of all time. The ur-hot-smart girl, Fey clutched her award Eve Harrington-style, looked out at the crowd, and said, as if she was about to confess some hard-won bit of career wisdom, "You know, young women often come up and ask me, 'How can I succeed in the comedy world?' And I tell all these bright young women the same thing: 'Back off, bitch. I'm working this corner.'"
Fey's new NBC comedy, 30 Rock, is a spot-on satire of the modern, ruthless New York City workplace. Fey's character, Liz Lemon, works for a sketch show ("a ladies' comedy show for ladies," as an NBC tour guide describes it). But it could be any show or magazine or other vaguely creative job in New York. (The Girlie Show is nowhere near as SNL-specific as the dour drama Studio 60.) And as over-the-top as Lemon's fraught work life may be, it feels truer to my job history, at least, than any other show currently on TV.
The pilot opens with Fey skipping to work like some modern-day Mary Tyler Moore and running up against the injustice of a line-jumper at a hot-dog stand. To thwart the sidewalk bully, she buys all the hot dogs, then gives them to "the good people." She's compulsively fair not as rich a palate as the other characters, who are insane or borderline.
But that's as it should be. What Fey has always done best is play the up-for-anything straight man. She has fantastic timing, but first and foremost she's a world class instigator, the girl at the party who may not get laid herself but who somehow creates an atmosphere such that everyone else in the room winds up fighting or making out. Here too, like a modest ring setting, she makes 30 Rock's other three leads — Alec Baldwin's studio executive, Jane Krakowski's diva and Tracy Morgan's clinically insane new star — shine like diamonds.
Baldwin plays Jack Donaghy, the V.P. of development sent to retool The Girlie Show because of his success inventing a new, fast-cooking oven. "Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own," he says as he guts his new office and starts overhauling Lemon's show, critiquing her work clothes and paying her the compliment"I like you. You speak with the boldness of a much younger woman."
Morgan plays a comedian named Tracy Jordan, who says, defensively, "I'm not on crack I'm straight-up mentally ill," and winds up being an Lemon's ally in her war on the meddling Baldwin. Jordan delivers a rant about how he and Lemon need to stick together to battle the white man who's out to keep them down, to which Lemon responds, in a typical arch deadpan, "Karl Robe, you say?"
The original pilot distributed to the press starred Rachel Dratch. It was later re-shot with Jane Krakowski. The second pilot featured Dratch in a supporting character role. In the show-within-the-show, Lemon is trying to guarantee her friend's job even as The Girlie Show is changed radically by outside forces. The two pilots suggest that's exactly what Fey did when Dratch's role was recast. That makes 30 Rock far more satisfyingly backstagey than the power-play-happy Studio 60, which is true-to-life only in the self-important, humorless
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Ultimately, 30 Rock captures the joy and suffering of anyone who has worked herself up into a state of exasperated back-off-bitch righteousness over the behavior of employers.
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Aaron Sorkin way. The show's brief and so-so sketches, which feature the cute and game Krakowski in various hardy-har roles (The cat lady! The overly confident morbidly obese woman!), are entirely secondary to the dynamics between about Lemon and her coworkers. 30 Rock captures the funny, absurd joy and suffering of anyone who has worked herself up to a state of exasperated back-off-bitch righteousness over the egregious behavior of coworkers and, especially, employers. Fey recently told the New York Times: "I'm just trying to find that dynamic where you work so on top of people that you are able to love them, would do anything for them, and at the same time, as soon as they leave the room, you're like 'I'm going to kill them.'"
Yet Lemon is one of the most likable, decent and entertaining leads in ages. She and Baldwin's Donaghy spark off each other like two hard-drinking stars of '30s screwball comedy. He is astoundingly self-satisfied. She is endearingly self-deprecating. He is mercenary. She is just (as the hot-dog sequence establishes). They spar as equals. And how nice it is to see a woman so happily and wisely in power! In shows like The Office, Just Shoot Me and Less Than Perfect, women have inhabited more-or-less realistic post-feminist workplaces, but those women have never been heroines the way that Lemon is. When Baldwin's character challenges her on her show, she doesn't cry or dither she lies down on a table. When she's asked why, she says that when she gets stress dreams and goes to sleep in the dream it makes her wake up. A page hands her a Post-It that reads, "This is not a dream." So she gets up and, boldly, finishes the meeting from hell.
She negotiates her relationship with Tracy Jordan even more elegantly. Mutual suspicion gives way to genuine affection as the unlikely allies get drunk together in the middle of the day. It feels happily familiar. I've never found myself in an outer-borough strip club becoming friends with some lunatic co-worker I thought I was going to hate, but I've had countless work experiences that, at least in spirit, come pretty close. Assuming 30 Rock continues on this course, Tina Fey is a shoo-in for employee of the year. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Hooksexup consulting editor and Babble editor-in-chief Ada Calhoun has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor and theater critic at New York magazine, and her softball team's MVP. |
©2006 Ada Calhoun and hooksexup.com.
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