Love It/Shove It
Sour Lemon
Firmly ensconced in premiere ranks of comedy writers, Tina Fey should be a feminist role model. So why does she still trade in on sexist stereotypes at the expense of herself--and smart girls everywhere?
Liz Lemon, Fey's autobiographical character on the sitcom 30 Rock, is ostensibly like Mary Tyler Moore, a smart woman struggling with the idiotic men who surround her. But Liz, despite her stature as a showrunner, is portrayed as a consistent fuck-up, her fires regularly put out by her pompous boss, Jack. Beyond her hilarious incompetence, Liz is loaded with stereotypes attached to powerful females: she's woefully single and allegedly unattractive, at least according to the punchlines delivered by her co-workers, boss, and even herself. She dates losers. She spazzes out and then collapses in guilt.
30 Rock overflows with jokes about Liz eating junk food to drown her sorrows, being mistaken for a lesbian, and not dressing as adorably as her skinny blonde assistant.
It must be said that the show is equally shallow in its other portrayals; the vapid blonde actress, a family of quarrelsome, drunk Irishmen, and an out-of-control paranoid black film star, complete with law-skirting "posse." But I keep coming back to Fey's character. In one episode calledalled "The C-word," Liz gets called a--you know--by a male underling. She fears she's become a too-demanding boss, bakes treats for her staff as an apology, and promtly loses all authority. After an angry speech and subsequent collapse in exhaustion, the message has been hammered home: women cant handle authority.
Cliques, body image critiques and gendered office politics are always-fertile comedic topics. But it would nice to see this happen in a way that actually subverts retrograde assumptions, especially by someone as otherwise sophisticated as Fey. If 30 Rock is meant to contain social criticism, it's buried too far beneath Fey's self-deprecation to be clear. And if the sexist jokes are a way for the smart, attractive, and powerful Fey to make herself less threatening, then that's not very funny at all.
--SARAH SELTZER
Bitch Magazine, Summer Issue 2007 ("The Risk Issue") | p. 15
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