  Tina Fey. |
Network TV is a numbers game. Consider 20, 30 and 60.
30 Rock and Twenty Good Years are two new comedies premiering tonight at 8 and 8:30 on NBC.
(CTV, which pre-released 30 Rock yesterday, still isn't sure what day and time to air it weekly; and they've buried Twenty Good Years Sundays at 5:30).
One is among the best new shows of the year, the other among the worst. Yet the way the TV numbers game works, the best show could tank early and the worst could run for twenty good years.
Look at poor Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Touted as the next "can't miss" TV hit, it opened soft and has slid ever since, down to 8.76 million NBC viewers this past Monday. In the numbers game, 60 could soon be 86'd.
Is it just too inside-TV? That's the fear with 30 Rock, another show about a show, although maybe what didn't work for drama will work for comedy.
Former Saturday Night Live head writer and Weekend Update anchor Tina Fey is the creator of the series, which is also executive-produced by SNL's Lorne Michaels. Fey stars as Liz Lemon, executive producer of The Girlie Show, sort of SNL with a feminist twist.
New network boss Jack Donahue (Alec Baldwin) calls Lemon on his new executive carpet and tells her to hire loose cannon comedian Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan). When she balks, he purrs, "I like you. You have the boldness of a much younger woman."
Baldwin is fabulous as the dismissive network VP, all "cocktails and cufflinks" as David Letterman used to say about former NBC West Coast head Don Ohlmeyer.
Donahue was promoted to TV entertainment after developing the "trivection oven" at GE; now he wants to add "a third layer of heat" to The Girlie Show.
Some real NBC VP must have thought 30 Rock needed a third layer of heat. Rachel Dratch, who played the main sketch star in the original pilot, has been replaced in that role by a hotter blonde, Jane Krakowski (Ally McBeal).
Oops. A scene in the first pilot featuring Dratch, Baldwin and a tube of hemorrhoid cream was fall-down funny; with Krakowski it was flat.
The good news is that Dratch is still with the show, although she's reduced to a cat wrangler in tonight's opener. It's a good thing she's well practised at playing humiliated.
Speaking of humiliated, Broadway and TV veterans John Lithgow (3rd Rock From The Sun) and Jeffrey Tambor (The Larry Sanders Show) team up in Twenty Good Years, a sitcom as old-fashioned and predictable as 30 Rock is original.
The premise is pure 1986: two life-long friends (Lithgow and Tambor) hit the big 6-0 and realize that they probably only have 20 good years left. Before you can say The Odd Couple meets The Golden Girls, hilarity ensues.
Old pros Lithgow and Tambor throw themselves into the broadest slapstick, wrestling on racketball courts and doing all sorts of middle-aged crazy things such as wearing bikini briefs. Let's just say you've been warned about Lithgow and his "banana hammock."
Both Lithgow and Tambor probably thought they could pick up another fat pilot cheque without anybody seeing this mess. Or, maybe, after three years in obscurity on the brightest network TV comedy ever (Arrested Development), Tambor felt he'd be better off on a really stupid show.
Or maybe Twenty Good Years is really the more daring of these two new comedies. After all, in this youth-obsessed world, what network executive would green-light a show starring a 60- and a 62-year-old? Maybe one with his head inside a GE trivection oven.
