How 30 Rock Made Office Life Fun

When NBC’s comedy 30 Rock ends its seven-season run on Jan. 31, it will be memorialized for its fast and furious jokes, its 97 Emmy nominations and 14 victories, and the masterful, bone-dry line readings of Alec Baldwin as NBC suit Jack Donaghy, the most indelible 1 Percenter on television since C. Montgomery Burns. (At Harvard Business School, Donaghy was voted “Most.”) Yet 30 Rock should also be remembered for its upbeat perspective on the joys and satisfactions—and inanities and frustrations—of office life. As Jack says to Liz Lemon (played by the show’s creator and executive producer, Tina Fey) in season one: “Business doesn’t get me down. Business gets me off.”

30 Rock wasn’t the first of its kind, of course. “The big mother of office sitcoms was The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of TV and pop culture at Syracuse University. “In the early ’70s, TV comedy moved its focus from the nuclear family to the office.” More women were entering the workplace, and then, as now, most of viewers’ waking hours were spent with their institutional families rather than their biological ones. “Liz Lemon owes a lot to Mary,” says Thompson. “But her and her colleagues’ Seinfeld-like self-absorption about their jobs is what makes the show unique and modern.”