A Struggling Wig Company With a Visit from Seinfeld

Last year, according to the Nielsen ratings, rubbish reality shows like Armed & Famous and Grease: You’re the One That I Want had higher ratings than 30 Rock, the NBC sitcom that’s rightfully been called the funniest thing on television. Even so, Peacock chairman Ben Silverman had the good judgment not to drop the low-rated gem—it makes its triumphant return to prime time tonight at 8:30.

Maybe 30 Rock’s recent Best Comedy Emmy award will pull the series out of the bottom of the ratings—it finished out the 2006-2007 season in 102nd place out of 142 programs total. Or maybe the appearance of guest star Jerry Seinfeld, acting on prime-time TV for the first time since the finale of his eponymous sitcom, will attract new viewers. One thing’s for sure: series creator, writer, and star Tina Fey is just happy that 30 Rock is being watched at all.

“You know, we average about six million viewers a week, which I know is reportedly a low rating, but to me, I feel like, ‘oh my gosh, six million people saw our show!’” she said in a conference call with college journalists.

When asked whether she would rather “have high ratings with a large audience that likes the show because it’s funny or a smaller audience that likes the show because they appreciate it because it affects them personally,” though, the comedian laughed, then said, “I’d be perfectly happy to have a large audience that liked the show because it was funny.”

Fey’s brainchild definitely has something of a cult following already. In an episode from season one, Alec Baldwin’s character Jack Donaghy made the assertion that NBC is a subsidiary of the Sheinhardt Wig Corporation. Now there’s a website that sells t-shirts reading, “It’s a Sheinardt!” next to a picture of a wig. Fey admits that last year, she “would Google phrases from the show just to see if they were popping up anywhere. ‘Mind grapes.’ I got a few results for ‘mind grapes’,” she said, which is another reference to a Jack Donaghy quote. “‘Pregnant cornbread,’ I think, will get you a couple hits on Google,” she added.

Expect more of 30 Rock’s signature brand of offbeat humor in its second season. In the first episode alone there are mentions of fake summer replacement shows like America’s Next Top Pirate and MILF Island, a throwaway joke about Svenborgia, (a European country “only rich people know about”), and Seinfeld telling two familiar Japanese faces, “Save the cheerleader, save the world.”

And there’s a lot to look forward to in future episodes. For one thing, Seinfeld’s not the only A-lister who will be making an appearance on the show: Fey revealed that future guest stars will include David Schwimmer, playing “GE’s environmental mascot, named Greenso,” Steve Buscemi as “a private investigator that Jack Donaghy has hired to investigate himself, to make sure there are no skeletons in his closet,” and Edie Falco as “a new love interest for Jack.” Arrested Development’s Will Arnett will be back as Devon Banks, Jack’s “gay rival.” Fey also says, “We’ll meet Liz Lemon’s parents this year too, but I don’t know who that will be yet.”

Maybe Fey should consider casting her own parents. After all, it’s no coincidence that she named the protagonist of her show Liz—Fey’s first name is Elizabeth, and she says that “Liz is absolutely a version of me.” There are a few differences, of course: for one thing, Liz is single, while Fey is married and has a two-year-old daughter. Interestingly, “there were versions [of 30 Rock] where Liz Lemon was married,” Fey says. Ultimately, she nixed the idea because it “sort of closed off story options for her. And it also partly was because my husband said basically that if I made him a comedy character on TV, he would kill me.”

Balancing her work life with her personal life can be difficult, but Fey tries to be optimistic. “A lot of times I think, like, ‘Oh, what if I had to leave my kid at home and go to a job that I hated?’ That would be awful. So we try to remind ourselves how lucky we really are.”