Brief spoilers for The Office and 30 Rock after the jump:
Gotta pack for a trip, so I’ll keep this brief. Dug the Christmas episodes of both The Office and 30 Rock. Dig badass Meredith a great deal—oh, yes, I will dump your Baby Jesus into a drawer! (My mother is from Morocco, by the way, but we’re Jewish, so I can’t vouch for her party’s verisimilitude. Except I suspect there are not so many sitars.) And the Office episode kept a nice balance throughout between the zany and the uncomfortable, ending in an awkwardly moving moment when newly revealed cuckold Andy serenaded Angela.
30 Rock, meanwhile, has done racial-faux-pas humor between Liz and Tracy before, but last night’s was very well executed, from the misidentified “rapping Santas” (“that was racist on my part”) to Liz’s FUBU ignorance (“If that some kind of swear word?”) to the post office (“Maybe you can help me, Trené—” “Irene.”) to the apartment at “245th Street and Lawrence Taylor Boulevard” (“Letters to Santa, not Letters to Lonely White Lady”). It’s hard for a sitcom to go there without falling into cliché jokes, but 30 Rock pulled it off. (If only there could have been a Black Princess Unicorn joke here too.)
All this, plus a very nice moment at the end for Alec Baldwin and Elaine Stritch–“What kind of mother tells her son John Kennedy died because he talked in church!”–and another excuse for Jane Krakowski to sing. My horn can pierce the sky!