Log 5: 30 Rock

I've written before about my relationship with television, but no television show demonstrates my deep love and appreciation for the medium like 30 Rock does. I've been watching 30 Rock for as long as I can remember. My mom watched it as I grew up, and I was probably around eight when I started watching it on my own. When I first started watching it on my own, there were certain scenes that when I watched them, they would seem very familiar, and I would have these weird flashbacks to falling asleep in my mom's bed as she was watching it. Over the years, my love for 30 Rock has separated itself from my mom, unlike how I described my feelings toward The West Wing in a previous blog post. I've watched and rewatched the show literally dozens of times. In fact, I'm pretty much in a perpetual state of rewatching it. I've said before that 30 Rock makes up about twenty percent of my heart. Friends, family, and all that make up the other eighty, but twenty percent of my heart is reserved exclusively for this show. One of my favorite things about 30 Rock is its ability to examine different aspects of the media within the show. Since it's a show within a show, they deal with things such as product placement. For example, when Jack, who's a high-up executive at GE and head of network programming for NBC (in the show; in real life he's Alec Baldwin), tells the writers of TGS (the show within the show) that they have to incorporate GE products into the show, they have varied reactions to the product placement. The best part is when the show itself does product placement, because they really lean into it. One time they did product placement for Snapple, and it escalated from a somewhat casual, believable discussion about Snapple to an exaggerated commercial. Then, of course, there's the time when Liz Lemon talked about how great Verizon phones were, and then looked directly into the camera and said "Can we have our money now?" This is only one of the millions of reasons I love this show.