30 Rock Once Seemed on the Verge of Getting “Canceled” for Good. There’s a Reason It Will Never Die.

This article is part of 20 Years of 30 Rock, Slate’s celebration of the iconic sitcom two decades after its premiere.

Not that long ago, it seemed like 30 Rock’s goose was cooked. Tina Fey spent the years after her NBC sitcom went off the air in 2013 entangled in a string of controversies, ranging from her prickly dismissal of critics who took issue with the casting of Jane Krakowski as a Native American on her follow-up series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to the widespread backlash against an instantly infamous Saturday Night Live bit where she suggested that Americans calm their fears about the rise of white supremacists by stuffing their faces with cake. In 2020, a month after the murder of George Floyd, Fey and her 30 Rock co-creator Robert Carlock asked streaming services to remove four episodes from digital platforms that included scenes of white actors in blackface makeup, a departure from her previous declaration that she was “opting out” of “the culture of demanding apologies.” “I understand now that intent is not a free pass for white people to use these images,” Fey wrote. “I apologize for pain they have caused. Going forward, no comedy-loving kid needs to stumble on these tropes and be stung by their ugliness.” But her apology did little to stem the rising tide of criticism, or counter the sense that Fey, once an icon of liberal white feminism, had become irredeemably problematic, or at least permanently besmirched. Fey’s admission of guilt prompted calls for her to be stripped of the career-spanning Mark Twain Prize, and by 2021, even the author of The 30 Rock Book was arguing that the show’s “troubling” treatment of race was a permanent stain on its reputation, if not necessarily a fatal one.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2026, when Fey is the star and co-creator of a hit Netflix series and 30 Rock ranked eighth in the New York Times’ canon-defining poll of the 21^st century’s 100 best shows. Only 10 years ago BuzzFeed was haughtily informing us that it was “time to stop apologizing for Tina Fey.” Now, it feels like there’s nothing to apologize for.

What changed? For one thing, Fey and Carlock’s decision to pull the offensive 30 Rock episodes seems to have worked; in the post-physical-media era, what’s not on streaming might as well not exist. The aggressive right-wing turn of post-Elon X has blunted the force of Twitter’s callout culture, and the power of what’s now being referred to as “Woke 1.0” has waned. Or maybe we just love Tina Fey too much to let her go.

30 Rock hasn’t seen a streaming-era revival on the order of The Office or Friends, perhaps because it doesn’t offer the lulling pleasures of the comfort watch. But, 20 years after its premiere, it lives on in other ways, in turns of phrase that have become part of the everyday lexicon (“I want to go to there”), and in the brainy irreverence of shows like HBO’s The Other Two that share its lethal allergy to pat sentimentality. (Fey and Carlock share a deep-seated Gen X revulsion to even the faintest whiff of sincerity.) Like The Simpsons, 30 Rock endures because of the density and smartness of its writing, and a deep-set commitment to absurdity that stands outside of time. The show is often pegged as a satire (a word invoked in the Times’ Top 100 list), and it’s true that Fey and Co. frequently turn their sights on the culture of network TV, parodying their parent company’s actual acquisition by Comcast by having the in-show NBC acquired by an unglamorous conglomerate named Kabletown. But the series’ prescience also works against it in some ways; it’s less funny to conjure a fictitious competition show called MILF Island when real life has since followed suit. What shine through now are the moments when 30 Rock snaps its tether to reality entirely, entering a realm of sheer ridiculousness where only the boldest and dumbest TV shows dare to tread. The flair for free-floating gags is one reason the show makes such immortal meme-bait; you don’t need to remember why Steve Buscemi’s posing as a high school student to toss off a quick How do you do, fellow kids?

Fey and Carlock and 30 Rock’s writers took plenty of opportunities to bite the hand that fed them during their seven-season run, but the show’s jabs at the cluelessness of network suits, embodied by Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, tended to be at least guardedly affectionate, or at least tinged with the understanding that, as a primetime sitcom with middling ratings, they were in no position to seize the moral high ground. In the second season, Fey’s Liz Lemon, an idealistic comedy showrunner who occasionally bends her principles to keep her show on the air, meets a legendary TV writer, Rosemary (Carrie Fisher), who she’s idolized since childhood. Liz is briefly inspired to follow in her hero’s footsteps and stand up to the Man—the Man being Jack, an Ivy League titan infused with the swagger of Fey’s former SNL boss Lorne Michaels—but when doing so gets her fired, she realizes that Rosemary’s anti-establishment sensibilities have only made her unemployable—and that the counterculture satire she was famous for in the 1960s has become incomprehensible with time. (“Don’t you get it?” Rosemary asks after replaying one particularly inscrutable gag. “The mailbox was Haldeman!”) It takes Liz no time at all to abandon her principles and beg for her job back, salving her conscience by pledging to send her washed-up role model a few hundred bucks a month.

Some of 30 Rock’s reference points have grown more distant with the decades, like the phone-throwing incident that inspired the Season 5 quip about Russell Crowe throwing a benefit for the victims of his own mood swings. But its chaotic surrealism has aged like wine. Some critics took issue with the show’s increasingly cartoonish characterizations over time, which took Liz from being a middle-aged woman struggling to balance her career and her romantic life to a slovenly wreck of a person who at one point reveals that she’s wearing a Duane Reade bag as underwear. But Fey relished the opportunity to be ridiculous, as in the late-series episode when Liz gets so sick she sneezes out gray matter, staring worriedly at a used tissue as she says, “Hopefully it’s not an important parg of my blurn.”

Fey also leaned into the opportunity to build a show around a female protagonist who, for once, was the opposite of aspirational. Liz wasn’t an anti-hero like the brooding male leads of so many contemporary cable dramas, just a well-meaning idealist whose principles frequently led her in precisely the wrong direction. In the first season, she discovers that Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), the Black movie star who has bounced bad to doing television after a very public meltdown, isn’t reading his lines off the TGS cue cards, and she comes to the conclusion that it must be because he can’t read at all. Her white liberal concern kicks in so fast she breezes right past the underlying racism of her assumption, and rather than call her on it, Tracy decides to turn it to his advantage, all while stoking Liz’s conviction that she’s doing a good thing. “Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” he crows, “thanks to one very special white lady!” (Over the run of the series, it’s gradually established that Tracy does have large pockets of ignorance, not because of his underprivileged childhood but because he lives in the bubble created by his insane wealth.)

Tracy forgives Liz her soft bigotry, in part because he gets caught exploiting it to skip out on rehearsals, but the show, at least, doesn’t forget it. Especially at the beginning of 30 Rock’s run, the subject of race comes up on almost a weekly basis, and Liz is almost always on the wrong side of the argument. She’s explicitly called out for racism more than once, either by another character or by herself, perhaps with more regularity than any primetime protagonist since Archie Bunker. And though she always acknowledges the fault and vows to do better, she rarely does. Weighing in at the end of 30 Rock’s run, Ta-Nehisi Coates praised the series for handling race better than any mainstream show, not for imagining a more harmonious future but because it never stopped “interrogating whiteness.”

Sitcom characters rarely undergo profound change, because it disrupts the fragile balance that makes up a classic ensemble. But on 30 Rock that constancy takes on a deeper meaning. Its central characters are all narcissistic monsters of one sort of another: self-righteous (Liz), vain (Jenna), self-aggrandizing (Tracy), Republican (Jack). And if anything, they grow worse and not better over the series’ run, at least until its endgame grudgingly allows for a hint of personal growth. It’s not that they aren’t striving to be better people. But their flaws, as well as the rules of television, keep holding them back.

All, that is, except for Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), the NBC page permanently assigned to 30 Rock’s corridors. A grinning goober with a hillbilly twang, Kenneth loves only two things: “everybody and television.” And that love isn’t dimmed by learning how network TV’s sausage is made, or being privy to the manifestly unadmirable qualities of the people who make it. Over the course of the series, 30 Rock’s writers reveal that Kenneth has wooden false teeth, that his parents were cousins (or possibly brothers), and that he is a “flesh vessel” for an immortal being that is over 200 years old. But whether human or otherwise, his heart stays pure. Whatever troubles arise in the other characters’ lives, whatever battles they’re fighting—with the network, among themselves, or with their own dark natures—he reminds them that they have come together for the most important purpose there is: making a TV show. And while that part is more than a little tongue in cheek, there’s something to 30 Rock’s abiding conviction that there is no disagreement, no difference, so great that it can’t be overcome in service of a common goal, even if that goal isn’t particularly important. And that spirit, like Kenneth the page and like 30 Rock itself, will never die.

Read the rest of 20 Years of 30 Rock.