"30 Rock" (4.05) "The Problem Solvers"

Left, set pics we got before air date. Right, greenscreened and color corrected.

Comedy is a tough recap – you either end up transcribing the whole show, or giving a very, very broad opinion. When the show is something as meta as 30 Rock, a show about making a show, it gets particularly dicey. So I’m not going to try.

The general idea of last night’s show was growth on a foundation. You had the Jack (Alec Baldwin) and Liz (Tina Fey) storyline, about taking one of her sketches and turning it into a standalone show.

Connecting it to the other storyline were Jenna (Jane Krakowski) and Tracy (Tracy Morgan), who decided they could go around solving problems for people. This being a comedy, and them being written as idiots, they cause all the problems, including some for themselves.

They never get the shirts in the right order.

But the piece we care about is the arrival of the hunky Cheyenne Jackson to the show. He’s playing Jack, but since Original Jack doesn’t share, even his name, we’ll call him Danny. Danny isn’t too bright, and, well, he’s also Canadian, so by the standards of this show, he’s practically unable to dress himself.

He was hired after Jack saw him as a busker (street performer), sprayed silver like a robot, and hired him for a national show. The silver paint has left him a little challenged, mentally, and being Canadian, well, that’s evidently really tough to overcome.

But the tragedy is he won’t let Kenneth the Page (Jack McBrayer) serve him, in any way. Not even to pick up lunch. This causes Kenneth serious distress, and he reaches out to Jenna and Tracy to explain that actors are higher on the food chain than a page, and that’s O.K. Of course, it works out the opposite way, with Jenna and Tracy abandoning Kenny’s services.

He just wants to be nice and suppress his Canadian accent. And mug for the camera.