"30 Rock" premiere

Grade: B-

Review by Matt Sundberg

"Saturday Night Live" is an aging, dying walrus. The show has become formulaic, uninteresting and just plain unfunny in the past few years.

Having said that, the show "30 Rock" looked mildly entertaining to me before I watched it last Wednesday, due to the actual "funny people" from SNL writing and starring in it, namely Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan.

What I realized after watching the pilot of "30 Rock" is that the presence of Alec Baldwin can improve the quality of any show.

"30 Rock" is a sitcom about the behind-the-scenes life of a live-television writer (Tina Fey) and her various coworkers (Jane Krakowski, Judah Friedlander) working for an NBC show called "The Girlie Show." This show bears a striking similarity to SNL - crazy characters, weird costumes and ridiculous sketch comedy.

In the pilot episode, Liz Lemon (Fey) gets called into the office of Jack (Baldwin), her supervisor. She is asked to work with him on retooling the show due to declining ratings. The first time Baldwin appears on screen, he angrily kicks down a door and goes on a rant about how he invented the GE Trivection Oven, which cooks food perfectly in three ways. Note: General Electric owns NBC, hence the glaring product placement. He tells Liz that he is the new "Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming."

Jack sends Liz on a mission to recruit popular comedian Tracy Jordan for the show. Tracy Jordan is played by Morgan, adding to my belief that television sitcom writers are the laziest people in the United States.

Fey plays the straight woman in this sitcom, but is intelligent in her role as Liz Lemon and gets a few good lines. Morgan is also fantastic whenever he is on-screen, especially when he gets paranoid and starts rambling about the "old white dudes getting us down, while they inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets."

Baldwin, however, completely steals the show.

"30 Rock" wasn't the funniest sitcom pilot I've ever seen, but then again many people hated the first episode of "Seinfeld." It's too early to tell if the show will do well on NBC, but the pilot did make me laugh.

The premise was interesting and the cast was talented - that should count for something.