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Fans of Tina Fey’s screwball sitcom 30 Rock don’t have to wait until next week for NBC to premiere the show’s third season.
Beginning Thursday, devotees can catch the season’s first episode of the Emmy-winning comedy, which features the satirical shenanigans of a fictional sketch-comedy crew starring Fey, Tracy Morgan and Alec Baldwin, on Hulu.
The season premiere (embedded) will screen for a week — until NBC airs the show on prime time TV.
NBC’s promotion jumps on the bandwagon of a slew of other networks beginning to realize that a viable way to viewers’ hearts is through their computer screens.
Showtime pulled a similar move in September by streaming two of the cable network’s most popular shows, Dexter and Californication, weeks before their launch. Earlier this year, Spike TV streamed a pilot of blue collar comedy The Factory while Fox streamed the first episodes of Fringe and The Sarah Connor Chronicles for college campuses.
But NBC’s strategy may also be a clever ploy to boost viewership and strike while Fey is hot.
Fey’s recent hilarious send-ups of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live drew an audience twice as large on NBC.com and Hulu.com than the TV shows’ original television broadcasts, demonstrating that historically mainstream television may be more at home on the web than the boob tube.
Regardless of the rationale, having more ways to watch Fey play savvy-yet-bumbling network exec Liz Lemon in 30 Rock is never a bad thing.
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