Saturday, November 1, 2008

BEAM ME UP TO BEANTOWN

"I watched 'Boston Legal' nine times
before I realized it wasn't a new 'Star Trek
.'"
Tracy Jordan
'30 Rock'
I watched my DVR-tifact of the season premiere of '30 Rock' today, and quite frankly? I don't even remember that line.

I'm getting old.

At any rate, we can always count on '30 Rock' to Zonk the hell out of the TV Universe. What can you expect from a TV show about TV shows?

For us viewing at home in the Trueniverse, it's obvious what this Zonk implied - Tracy couldn't tell the difference between both shows because William Shatner starred in both. (I guess I have to get used to talking about 'Boston Legal' in the past tense.)

But the writers of '30 Rock' are not only brilliant, they also respect their audience. Some sitcom scribblin' hack might have overburdened that joke with splainins as to why Tracy made that mistake. The '30 Rock' writers know that we'll get it.

And that makes it easier to de-Zonk it!

Although we know the common factor between 'Boston Legal' and 'Star Trek' is Shatner, he was never mentioned; so we don't have to worry about getting around the fact that he plays Denny Crane on the former and James T. Kirk on the latter. As for the shows themselves, we've dealt with 'Star Trek' in the past. It has been mentioned and lampooned so often in the past on other TV shows (Halloween costumes, dream sequences, etc.), that it's almost tempting to just throw up my chubby meat-sticks in defeat. However, Toobworld Central has an all-encompassing splainin - somebody from the future, with knowledge of the "real" Starfleet came back to the 1960s and gave the televersion of Gene Roddenberry all of the information necessary for him to recreate the actual future of Earth Prime-Time, including such details as what the future participants looked like so that he could cast accordingly.

As for 'Boston Legal', we're lucky enough in that David E. Kelley gave it such a generic title. The joke had no mention of Denny Crane, or Alan Shore or of Crane, Poole, and Schmidt. So it could have been about anything that dealt with the legal profession in Beantown, even a reality show. And within the context of Toobworld, that just shows how off-kilter Tracy Jordan is that he couldn't tell the difference.

So as far as that Zonk goes, we can set our phasers on the highest setting and exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!

Okay, so I'm mixing my sci-fi shows. Go up to Boston and sue me.

BCnU!
Toby O'B

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