Mother's Day on "30 Rock": Oh, the horror!

by Ken

Imagine the surprise of NBC chief cheese Jeff Zuckerman to discover that there are actual disadvantages to not having a programming department. Sure, you save a lot of money in salaries that way, and considering the quality of the stuff the last programmers standing at the network were putting on, the falloff in quality wasn't as severe as it might have been with the new scheme of having Jay Leno standing by around the clock with a card table and folding chairs, ready to go before the cameras to run off his mouth anytime the network had anything else to send out over the airwaves.

It's nice to have Friday Night Lights back finally, even if this season has already been shown . . . what was it, on some satellite feed? I tried to watch a couple of episodes online, until I found out that eventually they would be run on Last-Chance Television, NBC. And now that I've gotten to watch the first episode again on a proper TV, I see that it looks surprisingly normal, considering this drastic budget cuts. (As I understand it, instead of scenery the actors are acting in front of old sheets hung on the wall -- cheaper than using a green screen -- which was later filled in with an Etch-a-Sketch.)

She's back! Colleen Donaghy descended on Jack, not because of Mother's Day, but because word had reached her in Florida of the chaos in Jack's love life.

But to get back to this crazy scheme I'm proposing that NBC employ actually "programming people," let's say there were such, keeping body and soul together on modest six-figure salaries, and not just people who thinking up "ideas" for new shows (not to be confused with that preposterous time-filler in the post-30 Rock time slot, where each week several pleasingly cheeky folks like Ricky Gervais watch video of scary people in pathetic relationship crisis , then take cast votes in favor of one aggrieved party or the other -- is it still on the air? what the hell was that anyways?), but maintaining periodic contact with the people putting out their existing "programming."

Let's say that such "programming people" got wind that the 30 Rock people, who continue to do brilliant work seemingly heedless of the disaster area their network has become, rather as if George Bernard Shaw had written a couple of vimtage plays while sailing on the Titanic, were planning, of all things, a Mother's Day show! Naturally this provided a pretext for a return visit from the sublime Elaine Stritch as Jack Donaghy's (Alec Baldwin's) truly infernal mother.

JACK: Happy Mother's Day, Colleen!
COLLEEN: I'm not here about Mother's Day, John Francis. You know who's in my water aerobics class down in Florida?
JACK: Yes, Mother, I've memorized the names of everyone who's in your water aerobics class.
COLLEEN: Patricia Goodban (name?), whose sister runs the Friday night bingo game at Our Lady of Reluctant Integration in Waltham. Turns out last week that the game was won by Anne O'Connor, who mentioned that her niece, Nancy Donovan, got divorced and was runnin' around with a hotshot in New York City who pours scotch like a woman.
JACK: If I don't always share my personal life with you, Colleen, it's because you've never approved of any woman I've shown an interest in.
COLLEEN: Now that's not true.
JACK: I'm not having this conversation with you right now. I have work to do, and I'll be joining you for lunch. [KENNETH the page enters.] In the meantime, Kenneth here will be entertaining you. [JACK leaves.]
COLLEEN [to KENNETH]: Okay, entertain me!

This year the 30 Rock gnomes hatched a mad for Mother's Day. The entire TGS staff is ordered to bring their moms to town to appear on the show, in a desperate effort to counteract the disastrous P.R. of the network's airing of its supremely offensive show Bitch Hunt (with Will Ferrell as the marauding bitch hunter).

So it's not just Colleen Donaghy who's back, but Jenna's (Jane Krakowski's) appalling mother Verna (Jan Hooks, given license to be as revolting as she can be). Meanwhile Liz (Tina Fey) catches her mother (Anita Gillette) leaving money for the show's food spread.

LIZ: Mom, what are you doing? You don't have to pay for the food.
MARGARET: Honey, nothing is free. You remember that when a man buys you an expensive meal.
LIZ: Yeah, that's happening a lot.

Gross Frank's mom (Patti LuPone) hands Liz a photo of "Little Frankie in the bathub getting ready for the senior prom." Lutz's mom looks terrifyingly like "her" son -- a barely human appearance for someone of either gender. Whereas beautiful new kid Danny, the all-Canadian-boy-next-door, and his Japanese mother are horrified when it's suggested that he's adopted.

Since it has proved impossible to locate Tracy's mother based on the limited information he's able to supply (he remembers seeing her once in 1984), director Pete comes up with the idea of hiring a suitable actress to play the role, and Tracy's okay with the idea ("like when they was looking for John McCain's running mate"), except that he insists on names for his fake-mother candidates -- someone like Phylicia Rashad, for example.

All of this without even mentioning that Liz's mother had the one true love Liz dreams about meeting, only it wasn't Liz's father, it was Buzz Aldrin. And all of this in just a half hour, with all sorts of plot mayhem barely touched on here.

What I'm saying is that if NBC had "programmers," they would have pounced on the idea of an hourlong Mother's Day episode in a special Sunday time slot. Or maybe a two-part episode begun Thursday night and completed tonight. Instead it seems just a matter of time before 30 Rock is leading into Bitch Hunt in the late-Thursday time slot.

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