30 Rock: Think Like a Robot

Continuing the new-cast-member throughline of this season, this week’s 30 Rock takes place on audition day. Liz and Pete have handpicked their favorite choice, a skinny white guy named Jayden Michael Tyler, and have devised a scheme in which they will audition him and three unappealing alternatives for Jack, thus allowing Jack to think hiring Jayden is his idea.

This obviously brilliant plan spends the rest of the episode failing, and results in one of the more unified system of plot threads this show has seen in years, which is fabulous for me since it makes things so much easier to recap. Dot Com wants to audition (it seems he’s a much better actor than, at least, Tracy), and once the world at large finds out he’s going for the spot, they all want in, too. Plus, Jenna and Tracy drive around recruiting more auditioners from the gay, black, and Jewish populations of the city, so that doesn’t help. Liz, Pete, and a bedbug-ridden Jack are forced to watch a parade of robot mimes, panty-less Susan Boyle types, and Brian Williams before Liz realizes that Jenna, for the first time in her life, was right: Jayden Michael Tyler is crazy, and a terrible fit for TGS. That’s fine, though, because Jack wants to hire the robot mime anyway; he’s the only person in the city willing to shake the hand of a man with bedbugs.

Other things we learned this week:

• Dot Com’s real name is Walter.
• Human empathy is as useless as the winter Olympics (this February on NBC).
• Cisco equipment continues to be the gold standard by which all business technology is judged.
• Floodgate wheels are horizontal.
• Older virgins are considered good luck in Mexico.

Lines that I would really like to use in my day-to-day life, if I lived in a parallel universe where I had Tina Fey’s wit:

• Jennifer M, why are you so worked up?
• Your show is so stupid I thought you would be too.
• Even the mayor of Stone Mountain had bed bugs, and she was a horse.
• This conversation is over. We’re hiring the robot.

Season 4, Episode 4: Audition Day (originally aired November 5, 2009)

For more on 30 Rock, click here.

Thursdays at 9:30/8:30C on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal, Ali Goldstein