Everything Is '30 Rock' Now

This week, TLC announced a sexy new reality show that is sure to keep eyes on the network now that Sister Wives is done for the season. It’s called MILF Manor, and the premise is simple: Eight hot moms are sent away to find love with men half their age, only with a shocking twist. We don’t know the twist yet, but it’s pretty obvious that they are going to be fucking each other’s sons in a dirty hot tub.

But hmm, where have we heard that before? The concept/title/ridiculousness of it all sounds familiar…

“Twenty MILFs, 50 eighth grade boys, no rules,” is the tagline for MILF Island, a fake show that the real show 30 Rock made up in 2008. Whether or not MILF Manor will eventually feature two mature women “squaring off at Erection Cove” remains to be seen, but I would bet good money that at least one of the contestants has the same backstory as 30 Rock’s Deborah (“Before MILF Island, she was just a struggling actress living in L.A.”). The similarities are obvious enough that the official 30 Rock Twitter account (which, for some reason, is still active) took note:

Tina Fey’s signature sitcom was never a true ratings hit back when it aired from 2006 to 2013, but it has enjoyed a second wind, of sorts, in what was supposed to be its afterlife: as a streaming catalog staple, as a source of clips that can be mined for TikTok videos whose comments sections are filled with Zoomers going, “what show is this???”, and as a reference point for the entire pop culture landscape today. In the nearly 10 years since the series finale, one thing has become clear: Everything is 30 Rock now.

You see people say this on Twitter whenever a Deadline article about some wackadoo new show starts making the rounds. Jeremy Renner hosting a series called Rennervations where he makes “purpose-built vehicles” for low-income communities? Doja Cat and Dolly Parton teaming up for a Taco Bell musical? Netflix’s Is It Cake? Mark Wahlberg’s Father Stu? These productions — which, again, all exist in real life — call 30 Rock to mind because they are stupid, yes, but moreso because they are all pieces of content that assume you are stupid. That is the joke at the heart of 30 Rock: network executives believing that the American public will eat up whatever bottom-of-the-barrel slop gets put in front of them. And even though Fey and her writers’ room were joking, they were also, for the most part, right about that.

The Real Housewives franchises are even more popular now than when 30 Rock did its Queen of Jordan episodes — Potomac’s Candiace Dillard Bassett, also a woman with a single who is obsessed with her dumb husband, being the most obvious heir to Angie Jordan’s throne. The show in which Kevin and Frankie Jonas ask people with famous relatives to guess each other’s famous relatives is somehow dumber than 30 Rock’s fake show Homonym, in which contestants had to guess whether the host was saying “meat” or “meet.” And, at this point, if Netflix put up 10 episodes of Bitch Hunter, I would probably watch at least three of them.

But it’s not just TV that is mirroring 30 Rock — like I said, it’s everything.

A Black Republican candidate so stupid that you could just recite him verbatim and it would sound like the work of at least four Ivy League-educated comedians writing an Saturday Night Live sketch? Herschel Walker is walking on a path already trod by the fictional Gov. Bob Dunston in 30 Rock’s seventh season. Here’s a game: Who said, “See, that girl was in my car because I was trying to talk her out of being a prostitute”? Okay, it was Dunston, but you probably had to think about it, didn’t you?

Jane Krakowski’s Jenna Maroney dating a drag queen whose main schtick is impersonating her? Them opening up their relationship so they can go on a “sexual walkabout” before deciding to settle down together? In Bushwick, they call that Tuesday.

Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy going to “real America” to find a new cast member who doesn’t pander to “elitist, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, left-wing” audiences (“Just say Jewish, this is taking forever.”), only to rescind their offer after learning that people are awful everywhere? Do you guys remember SNL’s Shane Gillis fiasco?

But the thing that 30 Rock got most consistently right was the understanding that celebrities are insane. Being rich and coddled makes you completely incapable of comprehending what regular people want and need. There’s a whole subplot in one episode where Tracy Jordan (played by Tracy Morgan) tries to understand the common man, and asks a guy with a hot dog cart for “chicken nuggets, a beer, and some of my wife’s rice to stay.” In another episode, Tracy and Jenna are incapable of getting soup for their sick crew, instead deciding to put on a clown show because laughter is the best medicine. What is that, if not a whole slew of ostensibly A-list (and some random) celebrities banding together to bring a disease-stricken world “Imagine”?

Gal Gadot’s tone-deaf attempt at uniting a world suffering under a world-changing virus is echoed in the show elsewhere, too. There was “Kidney Now!,” in which celebrities like Mary J. Blige, Sheryl Crow, and Adam Levine did a “We Are the World”-type number in order to get Jack’s dad a new kidney. Or when Jack decided to film a telethon in advance of an actual disaster, and had Jenna sing a song inspiring viewers to “help the people the thing that happened happened to.”

I could do this all day — Avery’s “New York Yankees versus former mayors” beer pong game is going to be played by Eric Adams any day now. Jack purposefully tanking NBC by trying to make it as bad as possible foreshadowed whatever the hell Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is doing with “Max”. In an eerie echo of what happened to C.C. Cunningham, last month a dog literally shot its owner.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” people will say. Actually, you can, and 30 Rock did it all more than a decade ago. The fact that the show has become shorthand for things seeming too stupid to be real is a testament to how keenly it understood the world back then — and now. We are living in times so deeply stupid that reality is impossible to distinguish from satire; everything is too wild, too funny, and simultaneously too absurd and too grim, that trying to make art that asks, “Do you see how crazy this all is?” can only be met with a resounding, “Yeah, we know.”

Now all that’s left is to sit back and wait for Seinfeldvision to come to life; I give it 18 months.