30 Rock

The old adage that we shouldn’t want to see how things are made may hold for the sausage factory, but peeking into the backstage of a late-night TV show sure is fun. It’s a fake backstage, of course, but something about 30 Rock rings true. Perhaps the writer’s room isn’t always quite this weird—or perhaps it is. Maybe the top-of-the-tower executive isn’t as strange as Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy—but maybe he is. And it could be that Tina Fey’s Liz Limon isn’t really Tina Fey—but then again…. If we were “really” inside the “real” NBC at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, behind the scenes of such a show, we could seek answers from Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), the all-seeing, all-knowing NBC page. He seems to have a handle on what’s going on, and he’s the one who truly knows why it’s okay to love TV. True or false, accurate or exaggerated, recalled from experience or just plain made up, 30 Rock is as funny, or funnier, than the show it pretends to be producing. For creating television that laughs out loud at television, a Peabody Award goes to 30 Rock.