OK, here’s the sentence no one ever thought would appear in print: Alec Baldwin made me get over Jerry Seinfeld.
It’s true, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Let the world know. Who cares?
By now everyone in the free world knows that Seinfeld agreed to a brief, but funny TV comeback tonight on “30 Rock.” And God bless his rich little heart for it.
Seinfeld puts in a solid performance – not one of those annoying star turns like when a retired rock star comes on the awards show and everyone acts like it’s the reconstituted Jesus.
Jerry works it and works for his payday. In tonight’s episode-long cameo, he comes to NBC’s offices to confront Jack (Alec Baldwin) after the sleazoid network exec has digitized old video of Seinfeld and dropped him into promos for all the new NBC shows. This includes Jerry promoting “MILF Island” (don’t ask!), a fake show (I hope) about incredibly sexy moms left on an island with incredibly horny 8-year-old boys. Seinfeld tells Jack that he found out about it while “on a European vacation with my family in a country only really rich people know about.” Jerry demands that the “Seinfeld-vision” promos be taken off the air immediately.
Jack? He feels otherwise, especially since he already sold the time.
And I agree.
Jack is so terrible that I love him. More than Jerry. More than almost any other funny guy on TV with the possible exception of Tracy Morgan, who comes in a close second.
Jack is as good a character as there is on TV these days and, in this segment, Baldwin actually outshines Jerry.
There’s some great corporate-cringing banter – like Seinfeld threatening to buy NBC and Jack saying, “Right. Like you’ve got four million dollars just lying around!”
But as great as the Seinfeld segment of the show is (and it is), it’s the on-going story of the regulars that had me laughing so hard I almost fell out of bed. (Cut me some slack here, I’m working while suffering from a life-threatening sore throat.) Tonight’s episode catches up on the regulars who’ve been on hiatus from their show .
We find out how they spent their summer vacations: Jenna (Jane Krakowski) starred in a play about pizza and looks it. She’s now so fat she has the dreaded under-the-bra back fat.
Tracy separated from his wife, Angie (Sherri Shepherd), and is sleeping in his office. He’s assigned Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) to be his office-wife, although Kenneth is being hit on by the dreadful corporate-climber, Devon Banks (Will Arnett), who is going to a cult to stop being gay so he can become the new Don Geiss (Rip Torn) when the chairman retires.
To this end, Banks tries to get Jack to do things like eat giant pieces of steak so he’ll die. Banks has even proposed to Geiss’s daughter, who looks like a perimenopausal nun.
Oh, and Tina Fey, er, Liz? She’s still broken up over being broken up with her boyfriend, and what she does to relieve the breakup blues will crack you up.
“30 Rock”
Tonight at 8:30 on NBC