30 Rock: "Leap Day" Review

After last week's Batman parody, I had assumed that this week's episode about Leap Day would be a bit more normal. You know, toned down from Liz smearing herself with greasepaint and getting thrown into a pile of garbage by Jack while the Statue of Liberty, Mr. Met, and a prostitute look on approvingly. Wrong. If anything, 30 Rock ratcheted up the crazy this week by inventing their own holiday -- the glorious celebration of Leap Day, whose patron character, Leap Day William, "emerges from the Mariana Trench to exchange children's tears for candy" every four years. Leap Day even has its own official movie starring Jim Carrey and Andie McDowell, which plays on loop every February 29th. Yep, Leap Day is kind of a big deal, and it seems that only Liz Lemon (and all of us at home) was previously unaware of it.

"Silly" is definitely the word that comes to mind when thinking back on tonight's episode of 30 Rock, and last week's as well. Silly can be jejune and ridiculous, but done right, it can also be really amusing. Following a stretch of episodes that felt uninspired, and even at times downright lackadaisical, it is almost a relief to me as a fan to feel like the writers have really started challenging themselves to approach episode plots and construction in a creative and totally unexpected way.

ersonally, I have enjoyed 30  Rock's no-holds-barred approach the past two weeks and I think that for a show that is in its sixth season some outrageousness may be necessary to carry our enthusiasm as viewers. When we start to feel that we can predict everything that will happen in the episode after watching the first five minutes (as in "The Ballad of Kenneth Parcell" where all three plots were basically recycled from previous episodes) it is difficult to maintain interest, and a bored audience spells certain doom for any sitcom.

This is particularly true for a series that has not been developing much in the way of multi-episode story threads. The only real continuity we've seen plot-wise this season is Liz's fledgling relationship with Criss, which I find to be more irritating than engaging, and Jack's growing pains as a father. Jack's story line hasn't really done much for me so far either, though tonight, when Kenneth played the part of The Ghost of Leap Year in Jack's rhubarb-induced hallucination I did love Jack's horrified reaction to viewing Future Liddy -- a liberal Habitat for Humanity volunteer. Of course there is also the Jenna-Paul walkabout that has just begun and I am super-excited to see what happens with this.

Another fun thing about tonight's episode was Tracy's story line. The past few weeks it has started to seem like Tracy was just tagging along with various characters; a superfluous add-on that the writers couldn't find anything better to do with than to shadow more interesting characters.

Tonight, for the first time since "Idiots Are People", Tracy had his own thing going on, and though it was not riotously funny, there were some very entertaining moments. More importantly however, Tracy veered from his standard selfish, narcissistic mania: he actually did something kind for others (a group of homeless people more specifically). Granted, he needed a little bit of prodding from Leap Day William to get back to his roots and get into the holiday spirit, and he did have a 50k credit at Benihana he needed to use up, but nevertheless it was surprising to see Tracy behave selfless and mature for a minute. If this were any character besides Tracy Jordan I might be tempted to call this character development....but since it is Tracy I'm more inclined to say that this was probably a fluke, and he'll be back to his old self in the weeks to come.

If there was one aspect of the Leap Day zaniness that I wished had been played up just a little bit more it would have been Liz and Jenna's "slut-off" for Sad Thad the Skin Tag Lad (played by Steve Little of Eastbound & Down). Knowing a bit about Jenna's twisted sexual proclivities I would have expected more radical behavior from her, but Liz's Nazi-boy courting dance was pretty excellent. Maybe it was good though that this segment was a bit muted from what I would have expected -- with the rest of the episode being so over-the-top it may have been overkill to have a ridiculous or vicious slut-off here. At any rate the Steve Little guest spot was fun, as was the cameo by Karolina Kurkova, who wound up being the ultimate victor of Sad Thad's virginity loss despite Liz's efforts and compromised morals.