The Best Days of Our Flerns: A Farewell to 30 Rock

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30 Rock is, and may forever stay, my favorite television program. It's a hilarious, biting, meta, and frankly insane sitcom, the brainchild of SNL's Tina Fey. For the uninitiated, the show revolves around an SNL-inspired sketch comedy series (TGS with Tracy Jordan) and the goings-on about the crew. 30 Rock documents TGS's early days to its final episode, fittingly corresponding with 30 Rock's own finale, on January 31st.

I discovered 30 Rock during its third season (during my seventh grade, if I recall correctly) on Netflix, and quickly became enamored of the series. It was simultaneously smart and absurd. The characters were memorable and massively entertaining. It's just fucking awesome. I knew I had found something special when I watched Season 1's "Black Tie", in which the final Austrian Habsburg prince is revealed to have extreme genetic deficiencies due to inbreeding, and dies after drinking wine for the first time at his 25th birthday. I powered through the first two seasons (the only ones available on Netflix at the time)
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, then shoveled through the great manure pile that is the internet for a non-malware-laced copy of the first episodes of season 3. Once I had caught up, I began watching the show on television. This proceeded for four years, which is a good chunk of my life. Come late 2012, 30 Rock's final season, its seventh, began broadcasting. I'm going to be clear: this entire season (and the last six episodes in particular) was a masterfully-crafted send-off to six years of excellent comedy. As the season progressed, recurring characters were given send-offs pleasing in the extreme, take fan favorite quack Dr. Spaceman's (spuh-che-mun) final scene, in which he was declared Surgeon General of the United States, or extremely gay businessman Devon Bank's final defeat at the hands of one of the series lead's, NBC President Jack Donaghy.

But the true brilliance of the last season is exposed in the final few episodes, where we see the main character's stories finally end, executed in as lighthearted a manner as ever. It was a brilliantly 30 Rock (used as an adjective shut up) ending. I won't go deeply into details, but every character is given a satisfying send-off, and it's never sad. Sure, it's sad that their stories are over, but Tracy Jordan isn't shot in the face walking home after being fired. No tragedies occur, and it's an ending that manages to be both happy and absolutely hilarious. One of the final moments of the show is a callback to The Rural Juror, which was a running gag all the way back in Season 1. They unearthed it, turned it into a fantastic bitersweet moment, and used it to end the series.

If the hypothetical reader hasn't watched the entirety of 30 Rock, you really need to. It'll be a worthwhile 48.3 hours.