Working Girl

TV SAT:

For the would be-fabulous young woman on the move in New York City, Sex and the City is to 30 Rock what:

(a) Vogue is to Ladies Home Journal
(b) Fight Club is to Office Space
(c) Anne Hathaway is to Kathy Bates
(d) Ninjas are to tollbooth workers

Answer: (e), all of the above. I cheated, the same way the city cheats the expectations of the shiploads of smart women who scramble off the gangplanks every hour searching for cool media jobs and darkly alluring men. What happens when you actually clamber to the top and find no one to share the view except other women and gay men?

30 Rock is one of the liveliest comedies on TV, freshening the familiar — one relatively sane person dealing with a swirl of nutjobs — with a jazzy rhythm of unexpected allusions and surreal cutaways. Creator/star Tina Fey wants it to be more than that, though. She wants it to say something.

What it says is that professional girl life isn’t Sex and the City. That show, which was created by one gay man (Darren Star) and largely run by another (Michael Patrick King) was an odd mix of believable single-gal horror stories and gay fantasy in a skirt; the scene from this summer’s Sex and the City movie in which the camera gazes upon the mating equipment of Samantha’s hunky neighbor as he showers outdoors could have been lifted from a sleaze-flick called Soapy Stallions.

When asked by an adoption agency how often she entertains “gentlemen sex guests,” 30 Rock’s winsome TV writer Liz Lemon (Fey) replied, “Once a year.” All that is left of the sex buffet is picked-over scraps: “Liz — I’m getting drinks with recently divorced camera guy — are you in? Legally separated sound guy’s gonna be there.”

Liz, like much of the city’s female professional class, isn’t particularly young (Fey is 38), works 60 to 80 hours a week, is not only unmarried but often boyfriendless and, despite having a much better job than Carrie Bradshaw ever did, is more IKEA than DKNY. Economically speaking, her show accessorizes the malaise years as well as SATC did the investment-banking era.

Liz reels the single-girl imagery back to Bridget Jones-land. (She has a thing for Colin Firth movies). As her boss Jack Donaghy (a redoubtable Alec Baldwin) put it to Liz in season two, “Big night, Lemon? Let me guess. Meatball sub, extra bread? Bottle of Nyquil? TiVo Top Chef, a little Miss Bonnie Raitt, lights out.” You won’t find a crueler satire of single women anywhere on TV.

30 Rock isn’t about glass ceilings or unequal treatment. When Jack asked Liz if she had ever been sexually harassed, the two looked at each other for a moment, then replied in unison, “Of course not.” When Liz contemplates dating a 20-year-old, Jack tells her, “A youthful companion is the ultimate status accessory.” Liz is the one who says, “Maybe you can pull that off. You’re a man. It’s different for women.” “That is so sexist of you!” Jack says — and it’s funny because she’s right, and he’s ridiculous.

Liz is past all the feminist stuff, if a little guilty about it. The most pointed episode to date came last year when Liz met her idol – Rosemary (Carrie Fisher), a pioneering comedy writer – who turned out to be an angry, penniless old battleax who dreamed of writing movies about women "in their 50s [who] join the army and get laid by a bunch of grateful 18 year olds." As Liz begins to back away, Rosemary cries, like a menopausal Princess Leia, “I broke barriers for you….I didn’t have any kids. You’re my kid. You’re my kid that never calls! Help me, Liz Lemon, you’re my only hope!” Liz goes on to tell Jack, “Rosemary says that women become obsolete in this business when there’s no one left that wants to see them naked.” But, she decides: So what?

Season three began with theme music that parodied the score of Sex and the City as Liz strutted and took a catcall from a man in a limo. Mr. Big? No, Mr. Weird — Jack, her freaky boss. Liz was dressed up (to the best of her abilities) for a meeting with the adoption agency she called in the course, apparently, of giving up on ever finding love. “If my home evaluation goes well I’ll be a mother by the time I’m 50,” Liz mused. “We really can have it all.” Somewhere, a viewer is getting spooked and popping in the Sex and the City DVD so she can reassure herself that a hunky zillionaire will lovingly build her a personal shoe closet.

Kyle Smith is a film critic for the New York Post who blogs at http://www.kylesmithonline.com.