"Bitches can be tricky!" - 30 Rock, "Sun Tea"

After several issues with the NBC website not loading the 30 Rock season 4 episode 2, "Into the Crevasse", and not being able to find it elsewhere on the interwebs, I gave in and watched "Sun Tea", the episode prior to the first that we watched for class. I am starting to see how the narrative of the series runs from episode to episode; in this case, where Tracy gets the idea that he wants to have a baby girl (see 30 Rock, from a newbie's perspective). I am also starting to become more familiar with the idiosyncrasies of each character, and perhaps I am becoming... quite attached! It has been a slow transition, but I'm finally getting interested in watching the show beyond this class.

This episode sets up several digressions:
1) Liz's apartment complex is slated to be "condoized", so she tries to figure out how she can continue living there and create her dream apartment. This means she has to figure out how to get her upstairs neighbor, Brian, to move out. The two decide to move into his apartment together to band together against the "yuppie bottomfeeders" that also share in Liz's dream. After several techniques offered by Jack, Jenna, and Tracy fail at scaring Brian off (including drama and scary black boyfriends), a surprising technique takes the kitty.

2) NBC wants to start a green initiative within the network, and asks its respective shows to reduce their eco-footprint by 5%. Jack gives Kenneth the task of enforcing the new "go green" rules, and typical shenanigans ensue, ending with a cameo by the Green Father himself, Al Gore. The disagreement between Liz and Frank about "sun tea" and the grossness of the boys is also a sub-digression of the green initiative.

3) Jack sees the demise of his hero Don Geiss, at the hands of his son, being played out in the New York news media, and decides that he is glad he never had a family, and never wants to. Both he and Tracy decide they need to get vasectomies (but Tracy's is for different reasons- "The Cosby show lied to me, and I can't tell an amazing strip club story [with his son around]!"). Just as they are to go through with them, both men have a change of heart, and Tracy hallucinates that he needs a baby girl in his life.

Watching the show in terms of segment analysis proves interesting. The first segment sets up the first 2 digressions and switches between their development, in the order of 1-2-1-2-2-1-1. The second follows with 3-2-3-1; the second segment is shorter than both the first and third. The third segment, also the longest of the three, ties the loose ends and rounds out the story with a 1-3-2-1-3-2-3-1-2-2 pattern. The first and second segments provide enough suspense as to where the digressions are headed to motivate the viewer to continue watching through the commercial break, just as each episode provides a hint of suspense to keep viewers wanting to move on to the next. With this in mind, each segment seems to stand alone as a mini-episode.

I was thinking about the field of the show, and from the "Series and Serials" reading I found this line to be most pertinent to my understanding of the first degree (between the producer and illocutionary or projected audience) and second degree (the interpretation of the show's narrative by the actual viewer) tenors and fields: "... TV only gives the illusion of discourse (we don't see the real source and it isn't real conversation)". The characters on the screen mediate the values of the network to the viewer (but the illocutionary audience), which the actual audience then interprets individually, much like a conversation, but it is of course merely an illusion. The mode is the organization of this supposed "discourse", ie, the patterns in which the digressions are relayed to the viewer. Perhaps a deeper analysis of the patterns which the digressions occur will reveal a greater message from the network to the viewer.