Tina Fey has lost her lease. 30 Rock, her sitcom set in the workplace of a fictionalized version of Saturday Night Live called The Girlie Show, filmed its pilot in SNL's studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. But once the series was picked up, NBC relocated Fey across the river to Silvercup Studios in Queens. The show's sets are now detailed replicas of the plush network headquarters only 2 miles away: Peacock logos adorn the carpets, and hallway signs read Human Resources and Imagination Room. NBC employees who visit the set complain of persistent déjà vu.
At Silvercup to interview Fey, I wander around the sets as I wait for her to arrive. I start inspecting the decorations, feeling like I'm rifling through a friend's office while she's at lunch — especially when I discover the jumbo bottles of aspirin and ibuprofen stashed near the desk belonging to Fey's character. A bulletin board of planned sketches for The Girlie Show (since renamed TGS With Tracy Jordan) includes ideas like "Zen Cab Driver" and "Too Hot to Be Homeless."
The walls are covered with fake articles about the stars of the variety show from magazines like Daily Voracity and USA BiWeekly. A profile of Tracy Jordan (the mentally disturbed comic played by Tracy Morgan) is actually an elaborate parody of a celebrity puff piece, breathlessly reporting his prepubescent recording career and adventures: "Nothing could stop baby Tracy, nothing. One story about the amazing infant has him saving 16 strippers from a blaze in the public housing complex he lived in."
For stage dressing like this, designers usually just paste in a plausible headline and photo. Since TV viewers can't make out the actual article, the rest is typically dummy text, or "Greek" copy — often a Latin passage beginning "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet." But these clips included entire fake stories.
Most of the coverage of how HDTV will change the look of television shows has focused on viewers seeing every zit and blemish of performers, transforming a sex symbol like Cameron Diaz into a pockmarked horror. But this 10-point-type comedy proves that there's more to hi-def than how your favorite actress looks.
I start devouring the other framed clippings and toward the end of "Jumping Jenna!" (another overcaffeinated example of fake celebrity journalism) find this paragraph: "Greek copy can be good if it's written well and doesn't look like you just slammed your hands around the keys making a mess. If there are some sentences and some words, you can get away with doing things like this: nvud or this: cndfund cjidf ckjd. But really you need to be careful. Cameras nowadays can pick up everything!"
Teresa Mastropierro, 30 Rock's production designer, is responsible for commissioning much of that fine print. Mastropierro, who previously worked on the Comedy Central cult hit Strangers With Candy, knows that hardcore fans will pause hi-def DVDs and try to make out every detail in the freeze-frame. "It makes more work for us," she says cheerfully. After all, viewers already expect to be able to stop the action and examine the props anyway — as if they were playing a computer adventure game.
That's a mixed blessing for the integrity of narrative flow. 30 Rock has hedged its bets by shooting on film and broadcasting in HD. As Fey says, "HD video is beautiful for sports, but it doesn't help comedy, and it doesn't help humans. I hate being shot on HD video, because I look like two Frankensteins raped a Dracula."
— Gavin Edwards
credit: Jack Unruh
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