Watching 30 Rock

With the writer’s strike dragging on and on and on (Come on, producers! Come on AMPTP! Get back to the table and give the writers what they deserve! There is only so much Deal or No Deal I can watch!) there hasn’t been much new 30 Rock news to report. But as I was cruising around on the webs, I found and old, very brief interview with Tina Fey on E! online that I hadn’t seen yet before with information regarding season two. This interview came from an earlier, more naive time before writers strikes, insulting offers from the AMPTP and abbreviated seasons of our favorite TV shows. Some of the information, we already know, like about the story arc with Jenna gaining weight from eating pizza every day during her stint in Mystic Pizza: The Musical and the brief mention of Tracy and his ankle bracelet. But this is the most interesting part of the interview, and the subject that I haven’t heard addressed before: will Liz and Jack ever hook up?

The Lemon-Donaghy Romance Begins Five Minutes After Never: Despite their intense chemistry, Tina says there’s no romance—nor any sex—in store for Liz Lemon and her boss, Jack Donaghy, played by Alec Baldwin. “No, never gonna happen. They have great chemistry, I think, but in the writers’ room we always talk about it as Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore, or Han Solo and Princess Leia. Lot of chemistry, never happened.”

And thank goodness for that! The Lemon-Donaghy relationship is one of the funniest, sharpest, and most interesting on television right now and I am glad there are no plans, ever, to ruin it with romance or sex. That’s just not funny. This is not Cheers or Who’s the Boss? or Moonlighting. Personally, I enjoy the hints that are sometimes discussed on the Television Without Pity boards suggesting that Grizz is in love with Liz Lemon. (He calls her “Beth.”) That is an interesting storyline!

But the most heartbreaking part of the above interview is the following quote from Fey:

Begin at the Beginning: It’s early yet, but the writing staff is hard at work. There are no complete scripts, but according to Tina, “We’ve broken a lot of stories, and then I get in there with the writers next week.”

We all know what happened next — those writers were forced to shut down their computers and pick up picket signs. And it makes me sad to think of all the funny ideas (and non-romantic Lemon-Donaghy interactions) that we won’t get to witness this season.

30 Rock, Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy