A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO A COMEDIAN WHEN HE GETS OLD AND LOSES HIS AUDIENCE? HE STARTS TO GET OFFERED SERIOUS ROLES -- AND DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SEE ME PLAY ARTHUR ASHE? As 30 Rock begins season four tonight, Todd VanDerWerff has more than a little cautionary note:

All comedies can experience slumps. The longer a comedy is on the air, the more used to its rhythms the audience becomes, which either results in episodes that are boring and predictable, or a creative staff that goes out of its way to keep from falling into a slump, only to succumb to other pitfalls. Recent examples would include how The Office went astray by making all its characters into big, goofy caricatures in the late episodes of its third season and early episodes of its fourth season, or how Curb Your Enthusiasm could never find solid footing in its often-muddled sixth season. But worse is when a promising or even terrific comedy chases itself into oblivion, like Entourage did after its second season, or Roseanne did in its last three years. The question, then, is whether 30 Rock is just in a slump, or whether it’s plunging off a cliff into oblivion. And while I remain hopeful it's just a slump, there are troubling signs that the cliff could be just ahead....

Be sure to scroll down to the smart comment by "sad tortoise," who notes: "They don't really know what to do with Liz []. At the end of the second season, she was suddenly going to adopt a kid, and man, was that forgotten about quickly. She spent most of the third season bouncing off other people's plotlines, which is a weird thing to end up doing when you're nominally the main character of the show. Tracy's character has devolved over time. In season one, many of the show's best episodes - including possibly the all-time best 'Tracy Does Conan' - involve Liz's struggle to control her wildly out-of-control celebrity wild card. For season or so, however, Tracy has been reduced to a kind of affably eccentric man-child; there's no real sense that he's about to turn Liz's world on its head the way he did in the season one, and without that much of the conflict is gone."