30 Rock Landed on Us

One of the greatest moments I've ever seen involving anything that lasts for only 22 minutes happened on a Thursday night in the spring of 2010. James "Toofer" Spurlock (Keith Powell) bounded into Tracy Jordan's dressing room with some urgency. On his way into work, a stranger called him a "biggledeeboo." "Old-school racism is back," says Tracy. James can't believe it: But the president is black. That's the problem, Tracy says. James remains incredulous nonetheless: "Racism is back because white people no longer feel sorry for us?" And Tracy, who for two seasons of 30 Rock had let us believe in his buffoonery, offers a nugget of insight that turns James's world upside down: "All you've ever known is your affirmative-action job and Queen Latifah Cover Girl commercials."

With that, James, a writer on the sketch-comedy show TGS, marches into the office of his boss, Liz Lemon, and asks whether it's true, that he does owe his employment to a racial quota. Liz demurs, then concedes. He brought the "diverse point of view" mandated by corporate policy, and his salary is paid not from the TGS budget but from a separate quota division of the network. Angered and insulted, he quits rather than stay in a job he feels he didn't earn.

We'd never seen a black character stand up for himself on such everyday human terms, only to have that moment of self-respect land him more or less where he began — as a token hire and the butt of his coworkers' jokes. His quitting and ultimate rehiring in a more important position should be a moment of triumph, but no one on 30 Rock stays triumphant for long. The show spent seven seasons as one of the best in the recent history of television. Its last episode airs tonight, at which point its jersey should be retired but its entertainment-industry lessons about how to handle identity should live on. A farce about the pragmatic limits of ambition aimed a lot of its own ambition at the comedy of race.

For nearly all of its run, 30 Rock practiced what's best called the comedy of Teflon topicality. It had story arcs, but no matter how serious the offense, the show would usually manage to reset itself by the start of the next episode. But it refused to evade race, gender, and their discontents the way dozens of its predecessors had. It wanted to know what kind of fire starts when two different types of black men — uptight Toofer and uncouth Tracy — rub each other the wrong way; when Liz's sense of propriety clashes with Jenna's runaway narcissism; when the self-made executive titan Jack Donaghy encounters a na?f like Kenneth the NBC page.

The conflicts mixed and matched, like when Tracy and Jenna pulled a "Freaky Friday" stunt in which she put on a suit and Afro and painted her face brown to prove that women were more oppressed than black men, and he tried to make the opposite point by wearing a blond wig and painting his face white. Half the comedy came from the idea of these two stupid-like-a-fox egomaniacs waging "a social experiment." Half of it came from the way they inhabited their costumes: She looked like a smudge pretending to be Nipsey Russell; he looked like what would happen if science crossbred Paris Hilton and Godzilla.

At the moment, network TV is relatively rich with farce — How I Met Your Mother, Happy Endings, The Big Bang Theory, Suburgatory. But 30 Rock operates at several orders of magnitude higher, much like the The Simpsons and Seinfeld before it. It sidesteps protecting the safe and peaceable and celebrates the mean, pathetic, and ridiculous. Not far into the first season, Jack sets Liz up on a blind date with a lesbian named Gretchen Thomas. They bond over their fear of dying in their apartments alone and undiscovered. When you're single, Liz says to Thomas, "Everything's the worst." This is the rare show daring enough to bring out the best in the worst.

There's a way that network television normalizes and sanitizes the dirt of being alive. We can turn on the TV and see our ideal selves — the funnier, faster, braver, more entertaining people we wish ourselves to be. But for most of a decade the dirt of being alive was actually dirty. Norman Lear's great run of 1970s sitcoms — All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons — peeled back the surface of American idealism to invite the country to spend most of the decade with the increasingly liberal family of a bigot, with a witheringly stubborn feminist, with a black family subsisting in the Chicago projects, and with a middle-aged black couple that had earned its way to luxury. It was a progressive era, and it was short-lived.

Television in the 1980s tried to pluck the thorns from social issues palatable to a vast audience with far fewer television channels than it currently has. The landscape had been resanitized. Both Lear's contentious liberalism and the galvanizing perseverance of the Mary Tyler Moore empire were eroding. Activism and righteousness had turned to a kind of pacifism. The "temporary layoffs and easy credit rip-offs" of Good Times had morphed into the insidiously benign paternalism of Benson, Diff'rent Strokes, Webster, and Gimme a Break!, shows that represented a new strain of liberalism in which the needs and concerns of black people were more or less held in check by their proximity to the alleged privilege of whiteness. It was hard to be a poor black male complaining about the man when you were living in his penthouse. Television had lost its nerve when it came to race and social issues.

TV became overwhelmingly white, again. Mostly black shows, like 227 and Amen, were largely stressless havens, free of racial and social upheaval. That comfort continued to swell in the 1990s with shows like Living Single, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Family Matters.Most of these shows took the wrong lessons from The Cosby Show and its black-college spin-off, A Different World, the two most important shows about black life in the history of television. The former took lavish pride in blackness and the black middle class. The latter offered an absorbing survey of the many ways to be black. But each show could also be watched, respectively, as a universal half-hour about a large, loving family and as a resonant dramedy about the ups and downs of higher education. Not seeing blackness in either show meant the writing was generous enough to permit you to see past it. But that didn't mean it wasn't there. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Family Matters were more insipid shows that nonetheless managed to further normalize a black middle class, while characters like Carlton Banks and Steve Urkel followed the cool nerdiness of A Different World's Dwayne Wayne and further expanded the parameters of who else a black male could be.

But the problems of race and racism were shuttled off to cop procedurals and courtroom dramas or were being fought on nascent daytime talk shows and reality stunts like the alarming first two seasons of The Real World. 30 Rock turned a sharp corner on the depiction of those conversations. It's useful to remember that the show debuted in the fall of 2006, right before the cancellation of Aaron Sorkin's terrible Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, whose setting was a sketch comedy show that was too proud of all the positions it took to be funny. That show resulted in nearly two dozen episodes of awkward self-misunderstanding. It was like watching a horse try to ride a man.

At the time, the fear was that 30 Rock would be more lefty righteousness and politically correct self-affirmation, another gassy indulgence from an NBC star. Sorkin's show was pure Hollywood earnestness and view-from-the–Town Car platitudes. But after half a season, it was clear someone on 30 Rock rode the subway. The show enjoyed the mess of trying to get along. Its approach was Blazing Saddles to Studio 60's Crash. Liz breaks up with a geeky black business manager (Wayne Brady) because he's dull. But he swears it's because he's black. This is a man who blithely fulfilled no black stereotypes until he played the race card, which insults her sense of liberal guilt.

In one of the all-time best half-hours of television, Liz assumes that Tracy can't read. But he's actually just exploiting her white liberal guilt to get time off work. When she tells Pete (Scott Adsit) that Tracy's either illiterate or slacking, he calls her a racist. But she knows Tracy is working her white guilt, which is only to be used for "tipping and voting for Barack Obama." Part of the show's innovation was the way whiteness was as much up for discussion as blackness. Jack Donaghy doesn't see the color of his skin as a race so much as a class. He grew up Irish-Catholic in the slums of Boston, went to Princeton and Harvard Business School, and arrogantly votes Republican. He's come into his whiteness just as John Houseman in those old Smith Barney ads would have wanted him to: He's earned it.

During Tracy and Jenna's "Freaky Friday" disaster, Jack interrupts their complaining to make the exasperated observation that white men have it hardest of all. Kenneth begins to interrupt him by saying, "As a white man … " and Jack shuts him down: "Socioeconomically speaking, you are more like an inner-city Latina." According to Jack, Kenneth, whose sole ambition was to get out of Stone Mountain and into the NBC page program, can't even afford to be white.