Shoshana Greenberg

Slipping quietly into the night, sitcoms Ben and Kate and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23 stopped airing new episodes a couple weeks ago. Ben and Kate was in the middle of its first season and Don’t Trust the B—- in the middle of its second (the first was short as well since it debuted mid-season). Their cancellations are a TV tragedy. The networks are struggling to create good new material, and they were both fresh, funny, female-centric (and both from female creators) sitcoms that could only have gotten better with age.

Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23 starred Dreama Walker (June) and Krysten Ritter (Chloe) as odd couple roommates. June, a sweet, responsible wanna-be financier moved in with Chloe, who, as it turned out, was a careless bitch. The show mined a good deal of comedy from pitting June’s naivete against Chloe’s manipulating bad-assery, but the show really shined when the two roommates were navigating an unlikely friendship… and whenever James Van Der Beek was on screen. The former Dawson’s Creek star played an exaggerated version of himself who was friends with Chloe and soon June… and then June’s mom via Skype. His charming narcissistic behavior brought another level of zaniness.

Underneath the laughter, however, the show presented an unapologetic version of one’s 20s and 30s that examined transitioning identity, whether it was James figuring out his role as a former TV star, June discovering the joys of new-found singlehood and the pitfalls of suddenly being on the job market, or Chloe realizing that what she gets away with now won’t work forever. It also explored the two facets of feminine identity–the good girl and the mean girl–and what happened when those facets mixed. I’ll miss Don’t Trust the B—-‘s boldness and sass.
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Reading all these farewells to 30 Rock has made me nostalgic. When any show has been on for many seasons, you’re inevitably a different person at the finale than you were when you watched the pilot, assuming you watched it in real time. I didn’t watch the pilot when it aired but began watching shortly thereafter in the middle of the first season. My first episode was either “The Source Awards” or “The Fighting Irish.” It was the spring of 2007, the days before Hulu and before I took the plunge and got DVR (I un-plunged myself and got rid of DVR 3 years ago BECAUSE of Hulu), and I watched whatever NBC.com had on its Website. I was hooked immediately, and caught up on the first season. The first episode I watched live was the hilarious “Fireworks” episode, the first with Will Arnett as Devon Banks.

I was 24 in the spring of 2007, finishing my MFA and living with my friend in a tiny West Village apartment. I can still see the TV screen in our kitchen light up with those fireworks at the end of the “Fireworks” episode. I can still feel myself laughing hysterically as that snippet of “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” played in the second episode of season two and recall my amazement at the second season’s Amadeus parody in “Succession” as well as my communion with Liz when she exclaimed, “I’m 37, please don’t make me go to Brooklyn!” even though I was in my 20s.

While 30 Rock took a few episodes to find its footing, the first and second seasons pretty much guaranteed laughter in every episode. They also featured a slightly less crazy Jenna and more of a friendship between her and Liz, a tiny change that I greatly miss. My favorite episode of this early period was “Rosemary’s Baby” with Carrie Fischer, which explored what the strong women TV writers of yesteryear really pass down to the women writers of today and also featured one of my friends as an extra in the climactic “Page-Off.”

I can also recall, however, my disappointment when the third season didn’t live up to the brilliance of the first two. In fact, I didn’t think 30 Rock returned to the brilliance of those first two seasons until last year, the sixth season. When the laughs ended and Liz became more of a joke than someone making jokes, I had little faith that the series would ever be as funny as the first two seasons. But then Liz started taking charge again and even found a love interest better suited for her than season one’s Floyd (Jason Sudeikis), the only boyfriend of hers that I ever liked.

That 30 Rock is going out on top makes it hard to say goodbye but it also makes me ready to say goodbye. If it had petered out as The Office is doing, I would have said my goodbyes long ago and the finale would be meaningless to me. Now, it’s an event with everyone reminiscing about their favorite episodes and lines. While its no longer my favorite show as it was in the first two seasons, it will always be, overall, one of the best, and I’m so thankful that it’s been a part of my life for the last six years.

Friday night, October 12, the choir I sing in, Essential Voices USA, sang in the New York Pops concert, Some Enchanted Evening: The Music of Rodgers and Hammerstein, with soloists Kelli O’Hara, Paulo Szot, and Aaron Lazar. The experience was wonderful and a bit surreal. The following day I watched the film The Sound of Music with my four-year-old babysitting charge and wondered if I really sang those songs on the stage of Carnegie Hall the night before. Here are ten takeaways from this experience:

1. The prologue to The Sound of Music film is a beautiful piece of music. I never really listen to it because when it’s playing I’m distracted by Salzburg and the Alps. Listening to it without the visuals allowed me to really hear the shimmering music.

2. Whenever you can, sit near a harpist. I had that opportunity once before in the first row at the Met for Lucia di Lammermoor (which has an exquisite harp solo), and Friday night I was close enough to the harpist to watch her pluck the strings and hear her part.

3. Speaking of individual instrumental parts, I was behind the clarinetist and could clearly hear all his parts. As a former violist, it was great to be so close to an orchestra again. In the audience it’s difficult to pick out the parts–you hear the whole–but sitting where we were it was easier to focus on different parts.

4. Funny line I never much thought of: “There are no books like a dame.” from “There is Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific.
Nope, there aren’t.

5. “This Nearly Was Mine.” I know I’ve heard this song before, but sometimes it takes a few times to really understand how beautiful something is.
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Just last week I was talking with a few musical theater writers, and the topic of “people to watch” and “people you should know” list came up. I said that those list make me want to quit musical theater. Today, I woke up to an article on Playbill’s website titled, “PLAYBILL PICKS: The Contemporary Musical Theatre Songwriters You Should Know, Part One.”

I’m not angry about the specific people on this list (or, really, any list). Some of them are friends, and all of them are talented and work hard. I do, however, object to the fact that we must have these lists at all because they create a clubhouse mentality, with Playbill.com in this case deciding who’s in the club. It also doesn’t help matters that for Playbill, the clubhouse is entirely white men.

It’s a shame Playbill could not be more creative not only with this list but with their features. “People you should know” lists, with their insular nature, are only detrimental to theater artists and the theater community. So many exciting and diverse musical theater writers are out there trying to be seen and heard, and I wish these news outlets would work to tear down walls, not construct them.