Hello, this isn’t what I normally write about on Mental Hellth obviously, but I wrote this essay about my favorite TV show ever a few months ago for another publication, and then the package it was supposed to be included in was killed. I really like this essay, and I really like 30 Rock, so now you get to read it here, yay.

In the first episode of the sixth and penultimate season of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon has been hiding her new relationship with a mysterious boyfriend from her boss/mentor/friend Jack Donaghy. Simultaneously, Jenna Maroney is the star judge of America’s Kidz Got Singing, where this week kids are singing budget-friendly, royalty-free music in an American Idol style competition.

In the last minutes of the episode, as a young girl sings a very moving slowed-down rendition of Camptown Races (doo dahhhh doo dahhh), we see Jack in his stretch limousine, dropping off Liz at a movie theater, where Jack believes she’s headed to watch a movie alone. He watches through the window as she enters the theater. But to his shock, Liz is meeting someone—her secret boyfriend Criss. Liz kisses Criss passionately, and we see Jack’s face turn white. He looks as if he’s just seen something horrible happen. Which in a way, he has.

Every time I watch this scene, I feel like Jack too. What we are witnessing as Liz kisses Criss is not just the beginning of the end of Jack and Liz’s corporate romance, but the end of 30 Rock itself. Yes there are 34 more episodes after Dance Like Nobody’s Watching, but when Liz finally finds a successful relationship, and thus when the characters who make up 30 Rockefeller Center are no longer the centerpoint of each others’ lives, the fantasy 30 Rock expertly crafted—of a corporate environment in which romance and personal and societal growth and deep friendship and “having it all”, as Liz Lemon is fond of saying, are possible—has its fate sealed with a kiss.

By the end of the series, Liz has decided to give up her dream of running a show in favor of being in a relationship and becoming a mother. And TGS, the show-within-a-show, comes to an end.

This is a somewhat cynical turn for 30 Rock, which for its first several seasons is essentially a romcom. It’s an insanely funny romcom, one with more jokes per minute than perhaps any comedy in history, and so it’s hard to realize that underneath its rapid-fire dialogue is a tried-and-true and somewhat saccharine premise. It’s a show that, like most romcoms, implicitly argues that interpersonal strife is worth it because at the end of the day the girl gets the job and friends remain friends and life works out.

But the problem is romcoms only work if the audience can buy into their fantasy, and in order to do that, the audience’s hearts must have not been turned to stone by years of slogging through the worst of American capitalism.

For years, it struck me as odd that the last few seasons of 30 Rock seem to push back so hard at the early seasons’ optimistic heart. But given what was happening around the world of the show, perhaps it was less that the writers had a change of heart, and more that the show changed with reality. It, like reality, got worse.

30 Rock began in late 2006, as Barack Obama came to national prominence. Its first seasons aired at a time when hope and change was more than a corny slogan but something deeply felt by many Americans, including me. I remember skipping college classes to drive down to Obama’s first inauguration in D.C. and feeling an immense sense that anything was possible. The future was bright.

But then, things happened.

By the end of 30 Rock, the country had experienced a brutal recession. Millions lost their jobs and homes. Obama bailed out the banks and hired Wall Street executives as his closest advisors. Hardly anyone was punished for their financial crimes, and Occupy Wall Street sprung up and challenged the country’s concept of itself as a flawed but generally fair one.

Within those years, and through seven seasons of my favorite show, my soul had changed too; became hardened. I no longer felt America was a place of promise, but one of cynical corporate governance meant to crush the little guy. And it seemed that 30 Rock had a change of heart too...