"30"/"20" in Hindsight

"30 Rock" does more for its premise in a single
half-hour than Studio 60 has managed to do in a
month's worth of episodes. This was briskly paced,

wcrapkin...

It's pointless to compare them. It's like comparing Barney Miller
with NYPD Blue, or LA Law with Night Court. Ones a drama, the others
a comedy.

fairly comical, and Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey just
make a great contentious pair together. My only
gripe is that, considering its time slot, I think that if
it's going to carve out a respectable amount of
viewers for itself opposite Dancing with the Stars, it
probably should've had a laugh track. Not a canned
one, though, but a real studio laugh track applied
over it, the way Monty Python did it with its exterior
location single-cam skits. Other than that, it's pretty
breezy stuff that gave me at least one good gut laugh
out of it: "Five inches, but it's thick." Don't know why
NBC bothered with Studio 60 when 30 Rock is the
one that really works for the kind of premise it is.

Grade: 7.5 out of 10.

"Twenty Good Years," on the other hand, probably
could've done without the laugh track. You know,
you either do a laugh track right or you don't do it at
all is what I say. The second half to this one played
better than the first half and managed to elicit a few
minor laughs in the process, but the whole episode
came across as a bit rushed. Still, John Lithgow
and Jeffrey Tambor make a pretty good Oscar
Madison-Felix Unger odd couple and there could be
potential in finding some comedy gold, or silver, or
even bronze, in the age-themed subject matter, so
long as they do something about that annoying
laugh track.

Grade: 6.25 out of 10 [lost about a point for the poor
laugh track]