Screw the Cheerleader

NBC took a big risk last season when it put two self-referential series on it's primetime schedule (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and 30 Rock). The former was a well-written show about an SNL-type series which ended up being West Wing on a Hollywood Set Meets a Really Crappy Romantic Non-Comedy. The latter is a brilliantly-written anti-sitcom about an SNL-type series and has turned out to be the best comedy of the 21st century thus far, as good as anything ever committed to film.

It's all fine and well that the network's risky experimentation ended up with the hilarious 30 Rock surviving and the meh-worthy Studio 60 going the way of the Northwest Passage. But the navel gazing that NBC has committed to, twice so far this season, has got to stop. Not only has the network recycled an annoying marketing tagline from last season ("Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" from Heroes has now become "Save the Geek, Save the World" for the series Chuck), it used the annoying tagline in the first five minutes of 30 Rock. While the idea of 'SeinfeldVision' is the height of hilarity (the network digitally places old clips of Jerry Seinfeld into existing shows in an effort to boost ratings), the milking of the "Save the Cheerleader..." tagline (Jerry utters it in one of the SeinfeldVision clips) is the height of lame-osity.

That said, 30 Rock is still the only 'sitcom' that's really worth watching on network TV. And if I have to hear the network regurgitating any more lines about the rescue of a pom-pon wielding teenybopper, I'ma go Dick Cheney on a motherf*cker's ass.