It's a gutsy beginning, given that next week's show features a decent-sized cameo by Oprah Herself, but a good introduction to "30 Rock," a screwball comedy that's married Fey's responsible and subversive sides and harnessed the power of Alec Baldwin for funny, not fear.
Things have been going so well for Upper Darby's Fey lately that it might be hard to imagine that all those Emmys for the show she created and stars in, combined with the praise for pitching in to play Palin on "Saturday Night Live," wouldn't push "30 Rock" closer to the top of the Nielsens in it third season.
Or even just higher up in the middle.
It's easier to imagine that not happening, though, if you follow NBC, which first lost an opportunity by holding "30 Rock's" premiere to the end of October, after all its other Thursday night comedies came back, and then last week decided to put it online before airing it.
Take it from someone whose words hit the Web before the paper hits the front steps: This is the mainstream media equivalent of the Bridge to Nowhere.
Oh, I love it that more and more I can find the shows I forgot to watch or record online the next day. Don't even mind the unzappable commercials. But there's something considerably less special about watching something in real time on my actual TV, knowing that it's been in the ether for a week.
That said, most of my advance screening's still done on good old-fashioned DVDs, which arrive with increasingly hysterical warnings about seizing firstborns - or barring that, family pets - should any critic be brazen enough to upload what the networks have already uploaded themselves.
Maybe they should just encourage us to share.
'Pushing' & Obama
