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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: April 26, 2007
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: 30 Rock, “Hiatus” (Season 1, Episode 21) [Stream on Netflix]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: For a show as consistently off-the-wall and bizarre as 30 Rock could be, its first season finale was incredibly plotty. It even began with a Kenneth-narrated “previously on…” segment AND an opening sequence where Jack and Liz recap the show’s major storylines in the guise of talking to their doctors. There was a lot going on! Jack Donaghy was engaged to his avian-bone-suffering fiancee Phoebe (Emily Mortimer in a guest turn that we don’t talk about nearly as often as we should) and having problems in the bedroom; Liz Lemon had just turned down Floyd’s offer to move to Cleveland with him and thus was embarking on a long distance relationship; and Tracy Jordan, under siege from the Black Crusaders, had gone into hiding.
With “Hiatus,” those storylines were complicated thusly: Tracy’s attempts to hide out in Kenneth’s hometown get him plunged into a kind of Misery storyline with Kenneth’s obsessed cousin (played by Sean Hayes); Jack has a heart attack while attempting to make love to Phoebe’s hollow bones; and Jack’s mother, Colleen, has come to town to cast withering glances at both her son and his fiancee.
This would be Elaine Stritch’s 30 Rock debut as Colleen, one of the show’s greatest guest stars. This first appearance would earn her an Emmy award, and while she was surely happy to get it, it was nothing like when she’d won a few years earlier for her HBO one-woman show:
Colleen instantly hated Phoebe but instantly had a fondness for Liz, a fondness that would wax and wane over her subsequent appearances on the show. Colleen is a comparably low-key monster in this episode, drolly dismissing Phoebe and declining to visit her son in his hospital room (“I go in there, I get bird flu, I don’t come out”).
Still, it was a historic first for 30 Rock in an episode that ended what many forget was an improbably first-season success. Everybody expected Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip to be the NBC series about a late-night comedy show to be the success. 30 Rock was a weird little afterthought. But by the time the season finale rolled around, we all knew differently.
