On Thursday, NBC's butterflies-on-pins comedy "30 Rock" was nominated for a record 22 Emmy awards. Or was it 24?
Two of the spots nominated for Outstanding Commercial -- a category since 1997 -- feature Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey shilling for Hulu and American Express, respectively, and in each the actors are madly channeling their "30 Rock" personas. In the Hulu Super Bowl ad (Crispin Porter + Bogusky), "TV star" Alec Baldwin appears in Jack Donaghy drag -- good suit, cupid-bow lips, strangely sibilant, curried like a racehorse -- to reveal an alien plot to soften human brains with free online video. Never in the history of TV has the truth come so close to being uttered.
In the AmEx ad (Ogilvy & Mather), Tina Fey -- as meta-Liz Lemon -- is flagged down at an airport by Martin Scorsese, but she can't follow him into the business lounge until she flashes her platinum AmEx card at the desk. Precisely as on "30 Rock," Fey/Lemon stumbles among grown-ups, always a half-beat ahead or behind, forever emerging from the ladies room with her skirt caught in her undies.
Together, Baldwin and Fey are pomo's Burns and Allen, and these Emmy-nominated spots breathe the same winking, in-on-the-con air as "30 Rock" itself. The show has revolutionized product placement by making a farce of it, by making a virtue of artistic capitulation. GE microwave ovens. iPhones. McFlurries. After praising Verizon phones, Tina Fey turns to the camera and says, "Can we have our money now?" You bet.
Buy the nearest cultural studies professor a latte, and he or she will be happy to explicate the deeper meanings here. For example, celebrity can be viewed as a kind of text; these personas created by Baldwin and Fey are constructions, ironic confections, "implied" celebrities behind which the flesh-and-blood actors can dwell at a safe distance.
Alec Baldwin, playing "TV star" Alec Baldwin, can say and do things the serious-minded and principled political activist could never do. Like sell out.
The other Emmy nominees reflect the agonizing and expensive battle advertisers are waging against TiVo to keep people from fast-forwarding past commercials. The animated Coca-Cola spot "Heist" (Wieden & Kennedy), another Super Bowl debut, is a visually spectacular daydream in which insects band together to steal a bottle of Coke. The commercial is set to Prokofiev's irresistible "Peter and the Wolf." It is sure to cause temporary remote control paralysis.
