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

What is 30 Rock about?

Tina Fey created 30 Rock as a semi-autobiographical comedy about the backstage chaos of a sketch show, drawing on her years as head writer at Saturday Night Live. But it quickly became something stranger and funnier than that premise suggests. The show is a joke machine, dense and fast, the kind of thing that rewards a second viewing because the background gags and throwaway lines are as carefully crafted as the setpieces. If you watch television and care about comedy writing as a craft, this is required viewing.

Alec Baldwin is the reason the show works as well as it does. His Jack Donaghy, a GE executive who micromanages the fictional TGS from above, is one of the great comic creations of the 2000s, a man of absolute confidence and total self-delusion delivered with perfect deadpan. Fey's Liz Lemon is the ostensible straight woman, but the joke is that she is almost as deluded and neurotic as everyone around her. Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski play cartoons, essentially, and the show leans hard into that. The tone is absurdist and unapologetically broad, which occasionally tips into silliness that not everyone finds charming.

Critics loved it from the start, and it won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in each of its first three seasons. General audiences were a harder sell. The ratings were never strong, and NBC kept it alive on prestige and goodwill for most of its run. It is the rare show that was celebrated intensely by a relatively small audience.

What distinguishes 30 Rock from later workplace comedies that followed its model is the sheer velocity. It does not breathe. At its best, around seasons two and three, it fires jokes so quickly that the ratio of hits to misses doesn't matter, because another joke arrives before you've finished registering the last one. The later seasons lost some of that momentum, but the show at full speed is unlike anything else on American network television.

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

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