The Hurry Up: 30 Rock

30 Rock is in a rough place this season. Community is destroying everything else on television at 8pm, and The Office is revitalized at 9pm, and 30 Rock continues to plug along right in the middle. I don't think the quality of the show has dipped at all, but it can seem that way when the shows around it improve so much.

The Kabletown merger is still going on. It was a clever idea (and very 30 Rock) to mock the Comcast merger, but it has to affect the storyline for the real merger to have gotten so sticky. It's a good thing Jack has Avery's pregnancy to focus on because his character would be completely lost now that there's no more battle to become head of GE.

Everyone else is simply solid, which makes for a boring blog post but has made for a happily entertaining season.

• Best Episode So Far: "Live Show" (similar problem to The Office last season where the big event episode happens early on and it takes a while to recover)
• Worst Episode So Far: "The Fabian Strategy"
• MVP Candidate: Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy (he's been Reaganing)
• Rookie of the Year Candidate: John Slattery as Steve Austin (honorable mention to Tina Fey's butt double in "Brooklyn Without Limits")
• Favorite Moment So Far: Julia Louis-Dreyfuss playing Liz in flashbacks during "Live Show"

The Hurry Up: Community

What happens when you mean to go to Tivo.com, it autocompletes to your Tivo related blog and you realize you haven't written anything since September? You realize you suck and it's time for some hurry-ups!

Remember the "Sophomore Slump?" How the second attempt at something would invariably suck? Hey! I get to use Heroes in an example again! Eureka had the same problem, as did Lost. Comedies seem to play by different rules though. The first season of Parks & Rec was pretty awful, second season ruled. The second season of The Office is the greatest season of television ever after a lackluster first season, featuring one of the worst pilots I've ever seen (is that why NBC greenlit Outsourced? To make The Office's pilot look better?).

Anyway! Two shows don't even fit the sophomore success model because they solved their problems so quickly. Community and 30 Rock have pretty shitty pilots, and Dan Harmon and Tina Fey will gladly admit to that. Those shows didn't struggle for a season though, they had things figured out by the 4th episode and haven't looked back.

I was really worried about Community having a rough sophomore season. The Jeff-Britta kiss that ended the season was shocking, but I couldn't envision it going anywhere that fit within the show, which is why I don't get paid to make television shows like the Community staff. I really should write a retro-review of the first episode because it deserves to be discussed at length.

There has been a little bit of a "gimmick of the week" feel to the season so far, but there's nothing wrong with that. It'd be really unfair to criticize Community or Psych for having episodes serve as references to specific genres or properties just because it's been a sign of laziness in other shows. Community does it really, REALLY well; better than anyone before. So what would be the point in complaining about quality? Of course, it's nice to have "traditional" episodes where the show remains contained within itself to break things up, but they've been doing that too.

• Best Episode So Far: "Epidemiology 206" (EXTREMELY tough to decide)
  
• Worst Episode So Far: "Accounting for Lawyers" (which wasn't really bad, the others have just been better)
• MVP Candidate: Donald Glover as Troy Barnes (another tough choice, as everyone has been so good that it's hard for anyone to stand out, but a few episodes have completely fallen on his shoulders this year)
• Rookie of the Year Candidate: Kevin Corrigan as Sean Garrity (I don't expect to see him again, but there haven't been any regular cast additions so this is more of a "best new guest star")
• Favorite Scene So Far: Absolutely impossible to choose.