The Office vs. 30 Rock: The Battle for Thursday Night (Done Right)

So here we are, near­ing the end of 2007, and we can all sit back and enjoy the fact that NBC once again has a pow­er­house of a Thursday night. Can the old glory days be just around the cor­ner? Is Ben Silverman the Warren Littlefield? Are we look­ing at the early offer­ings of shows that will make it past 200 episodes? Let’s discuss.

The Office: An American Workplace

After a short first sea­son, the execs over at the pea­cock opted to give it a go with this British import and offer up a full sea­son in ’05-’06. The result was a net­work smash hit that went on to pull in the Best Comedy Series Emmy and became a tent­pole of the weekly lineup, not to men­tion a some­what lucra­tive income gen­er­a­tor via its con­stant num­ber one spot at iTunes.

In the third sea­son, the show went to new heights of com­edy, espe­cially excit­ing since it was head­ing into ter­ri­tory the orig­i­nal never even had the chance to get to. Still, for this hum­ble critic, the sea­son felt a lit­tle fat in the mid­dle. It opened with a pow­er­house series of episodes, explor­ing a new office in Connecticut and build­ing on the ten­sion of Jim’s failed attempt at dat­ing Pam. And again, as we neared the end of the sea­son it was a fas­ci­nat­ing web of rela­tion­ships and future opportunities.

But the episodes in between those high points felt a lit­tle rote to me. My biggest bone of con­tention was that Michael Scott seemed to be near­ing a fool­ish­ness more akin to Homer Simpson since the tenth sea­son of that Fox main­stay. Thankfully, the mak­ers deliv­ered a won­der­ful fin­ish to the sea­son, set­ting up for great fourth sea­son in the fall. Just as they did at the end of sea­son two, they ended with a slew of unan­swered ques­tions, keep­ing us all sali­vat­ing over the summer.

But then it came back on the air.

30 Rock: The Other SNL Takeoff

As his­tory will for­get, but we can all remem­ber, 30 Rock was not nec­es­sar­ily con­sid­ered to be much of a prop­erty lead­ing up to its pre­miere. The main rea­son is that Aaron Sorkin, beloved by crit­ics for his witty pen and pen­chant for “writer is god” com­men­tary (“Network” as a Paddy Chayefsky film, not a Sidney Lumet, for exam­ple), was start­ing up his “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” on the same net­work, also about a fake SNL show. No one could con­fuse the two, as one was an hour-long drama (melo­drama?) and the other a cool 30-minute com­edy. Still, Sorkin’s tele­vi­sion might was proven with the “West Wing” and the Emmy win­ning (but not crowd pleas­ing) “Sports Night”. While on the other side, Tine Fey’s only suc­cess out­side of late night was the film “Mean Girls”, and Lorne Michaels’s sub­stan­tial tenure as a tele­vi­sion pro­ducer has never included a prime­time sitcom.

Look at NBC now.

“Studio 60″ has dis­ap­peared into tele­vi­sion obliv­ion, and “30 Rock” took home this year’s Best Comedy Series Emmy home. For those keep­ing score, that’s two years in a row for both NBC’s Thursday night lineup and for NBC President Ben Silverman, who has worked to make this coup a real­ity for some time. It has been a mix­ture of many things that has made the show a suc­cess, mostly incred­i­bly witty writ­ing. While the sit­u­a­tions the char­ac­ters find them­selves in aren’t as com­pelling as “The Office”, the dia­logue is superb, giv­ing us taglines like we haven’t seen in years in prime­time (“Live every week like it’s shark week”). Alec Baldwin offered up an incred­i­ble per­for­mance and Tracey Morgan has done an amaz­ing job play­ing a car­i­ca­ture of him­self and oth­ers. For my money, the music is what really seals the deal.

And now it’s time for sea­son two.

Season 4: Relationship Mashup & D’Oh!

We all know that drama is based around con­flict. So do the mak­ers of “The Office”, and con­flict has dri­ven their prod­uct into the pow­er­house that it is. However, for this fourth sea­son they have opted to take out the main con­flict that dri­ves the show for­ward, the Pam/Jim rela­tion­ship. It’s not that I believe giv­ing the audi­ence what it wants, or rather the char­ac­ters what they want, is detri­men­tal to the show. this sim­ply makes it much harder for the show to retain it’s appeal when the audi­ence isn’t pulling for them. In place of this rela­tion­ship, the writ­ers have put in over­time try­ing to fill the void of con­flict, by empha­siz­ing the rocky rela­tion­ships between Dwight and Angela, seem­ingly soon to become Andy and Angela; Ryan and Kelly, now Kelly Darryl out of spite; and Michael and Jan, the lit­tle rela­tion­ship that could. I will flat out say that none of these reach the level of the Pam, Jim, and Roy love tri­an­gle of the first three sea­sons. Not even close.

Plus, for those of you wait­ing for Pam and Jim to set up a gift reg­istry, I promise that this rela­tion­ship can’t work. An immi­nent rat­ings dip will prob­a­bly force a return of Karen, or even a Jan seduc­tion before those kids can make it off to a honeymoon.

Then there’s Michael Scott. What made him such an endear­ing char­ac­ter all along was that he was a quirky and inept reg­u­lar guy with high aspi­ra­tions. We could relate to him, albeit prob­a­bly from the worst part of our­selves. He was a joke­ster and a bad man­ager, but his con­vic­tions were so deep that we could look past it all. We could even see our­selves screw­ing up in man­ers sim­i­lar to him. But recently he’s just plain dumb.

In last week’s episode, Michael Scott, in an effort to cor­rect finan­cial indis­cre­tions, declared bankruptcy…by yelling it out in the mid­dle of the office. It’s not that I don’t find this funny, I do in fact see the inher­ent humor. After all, how the hell does one actu­ally declare bank­ruptcy? But the fact still remains that he is the branch man­ager of a decent sized busi­ness, and that the sus­pen­sion of belief must be stretched pretty far to believe that he could actu­ally be this stu­pid. In fact, Michael has done a lot of yelling this sea­son, and it always makes him seem more men­tally chal­lenged than unsta­ble. The writ­ers want to put him through a midlife cri­sis, it seems, but the result is really just a bipo­lar tantrum every now and again.

Homer’s stu­pid­ity is what got the Simpsons to where it is now, a net­work sta­ple awash with rev­enue dol­lars but devoid of decent plot­lines. I hope this Office doesn’t go down that road.

Season 2: Boys Becoming Men, Men Becoming Wolves

30 Rock has both beefed up and cooled off, a great thing for a soph show to do. What I mean is, the pres­sure is off for now, as their rat­ings last sea­son, while not whop­ping enough to make a sec­ond sea­son a def­i­nite, were solid to the point there was an audi­ence that NBC was ready to see grow. And an emmy never ever hurts, unless you’ve already been axed a la “The Ben Stiller Show”. The result is much more cre­ative free­dom. The char­ac­ters have nicely set­tled into their roles, and there is much poten­tial for more hilar­ity as the sea­son goes on.

One thing that’s so refresh­ing about the show is that it’s one of the few shows left where you can miss an episode and still be caught up. Each show is just a glimpse at another story on the Girlie Show. And unlike “Studio 60″, there is very lit­tle biz tlk clut­ter­ing up the dia­logue. And speak­ing of dia­logue, it’s so fun to see what Fey and co. will come up with next. From Mystic Pizza The Musical to Werewolf Bar Mitzvah to MILF Island and back again, the wit is not just deli­cious in its moment. It sticks to the roof of your mouth and makes you want to share it with as many peo­ple as you can.

Still, they are a long way from becom­ing a TV clas­sic. There are early signs that each char­ac­ter could quickly become stale. Jack Donaghy can only be such a smooth-talking arro­gant rich guy, Tracy Jordan can only be irre­spon­si­bly crazy, Kenneth can only bum­ble about for so long. But I must say, all of those ingre­di­ents mixed together pro­vide some won­der­ful hilar­ity. The main thing the show has going for it is it’s focus on com­edy over sit­u­a­tions. Each episode realy stands apart from the oth­ers, rather than cre­at­ing a run­ning line of drama through­out the sea­son. Sticking to that for­mula, they can paint a much wider swath of funny.

Keep it com­ing, please.

Face-Off

The shows are not com­peti­tors. In fact they attract dif­fer­ent audi­ences, but with a decent enough over­lap to make who­ever is in the 8:30 spot quite a lucky show.

What’s that you say? What 8:30 spot.

Here is the problem.

NBC, never afraid to screw with the con­ven­tions of pro­gram­ming time, have opted to order more episodes of the Office sea­son than they have in the past, and more hour­longs than most shows would ever bar­gain for. The first four weeks of this sea­son had four hour­long episodes. That’s like air­ing eight episodes. That’s like writ­ing and pro­duc­ing eight episodes in half the time. In inter­views, show writ­ers will say this was a dif­fi­cult process set for this season.

We know, we were watching.

It’s just not fair or fea­si­ble to the show to give us too much of a seem­ingly good thing. Nets love it because they don’t have to invest in new con­tent. The sit­com has been a half hour for over a half cen­tury, and there are many rea­sons. Anyone watch­ing the new sea­son of “The Office” should be able to point out most of them.

On the other end of the spec­trum, I want more “30 Rock”. This past week’s episode felt like a com­mer­cial it was so quick. I’m not say­ing it should be an hour, but maybe an extra 8 min­utes once in awhile. I don’t mean to say I was bored with last week’s episode, but rather I was very into it. I wanted to get so much more but I was let down by the clock, because sud­denly it was time to go.

So who will win? New York or Scranton? Girlie Show or Dunder Mifflin? They both will.

But will either be on the air in eight years? If I were forced to place a bet on the issue, my money’s on “30 Rock”. “The Office” has fast become an ensem­ble show, which will be much more expen­sive to run than just Steve Carrell’s paycheck.

Who am I to say? I’m frig­gin Jon Poritsky.