When Does 30 Rock Season 8 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is 30 Rock about?

Tina Fey created 30 Rock as a barely-disguised account of her years running Saturday Night Live, and that insider knowledge gives it a specificity that most workplace comedies never find. Liz Lemon is a head writer holding together a fictional sketch show called TGS, which means managing Tracy Jordan, a genuinely unhinged movie star, and Jenna Maroney, a fading actress whose vanity is a force of nature. Above all of it sits Jack Donaghy, NBC executive and conservative id, played by Alec Baldwin in what is probably the best television performance of his career. The show is built around the friction between Liz's exhausted pragmatism and Jack's cheerful corporate ruthlessness, and that relationship never gets old.

The comedy runs fast and dense. Jokes are layered into the background, callbacks appear episodes later, and the show is willing to be genuinely absurd in ways that network television rarely allows. It is silly in a way that also happens to be very smart about the entertainment industry, about gender, about corporate media, all without ever becoming a lecture. Kenneth the page, played by Jack McBrayer, exists somewhere between an innocent from another era and something quietly supernatural, and the show never quite resolves that ambiguity, which is part of the joke.

Critics adored it from early on. It collected Emmy awards at a pace that became almost embarrassing, winning Outstanding Comedy Series multiple years in a row. Audiences were another matter. Ratings were modest at best throughout its run, which became a running joke both inside and outside the show. NBC kept it alive anyway, presumably out of prestige or genuine affection, and it ran for seven seasons without ever quite finding the mass viewership its trophy case suggested it deserved.

What separates 30 Rock from other comedies about television, like The Larry Sanders Show or Episodes, is that it is not really a satire of television. It uses television as a backdrop for something more like a screwball comedy, one where the jokes come so quickly that missing three of them barely matters because four more are already arriving. The final season feels slightly tired, the way long-running comedies often do, but even diminished 30 Rock is still sharper than most of what surrounded it.

Created by Tina Fey

Is 30 Rock renewed or cancelled?

Why did 30 Rock end?

30 Rock was always a critical darling that NBC kept alive longer than its ratings strictly justified. The show won armfuls of Emmys in its early years, but it never pulled huge numbers, and by seasons five and six the audience had thinned considerably. NBC tolerated that partly for prestige reasons and partly because Tina Fey and the show's reputation gave the network something to point to even when Thursday night wasn't delivering.

The ending after seven seasons was a creative and practical decision more than anything else. Fey has been open about the fact that the show ran its course, and there's a natural logic to that. The writers had spent years wrapping Liz Lemon's personal and professional life into increasingly elaborate comic knots, and by season seven the storylines around her marriage and her departure from TGS felt like a genuine conclusion rather than a cliffhanger left hanging. The show ended on its own terms, which is rarer than it should be.

NBC also had a long-term interest in freeing up the Thursday comedy block for whatever came next. By 2013 the network was in a rough patch overall, and carrying a low-rated show, however beloved, past its natural endpoint didn't make much sense. Seven seasons and 138 episodes is a full run by any measure. 30 Rock got to finish the story it wanted to tell, which is about the best outcome a comedy can hope for.

30 Rock Season 8 Release Date

Best & worst episodes

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