30 Rock/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • In Thirty Rock, for a long time I had no response to the slogan of NBC's parent company: "You can always tell a Sheinhardt". It seemed like an entirely standard slogan. Eventually it struck me... that's a terrible slogan for a wig company.
  • Another Thirty Rock example. Jack mentioned in the pilot episode that his father once lured him to the edge of a pool using a puppy and then pushed him in to teach him how to swim. Jack was two years old, which meant that his father left shortly after. Jack had a collie named "Pop" who got run over by a milk truck. "Pop" might be the bait puppy, the last thing with which he could really associate his father before his dad started ditching his family. This show has layers.
    • At one point, Liz is at a wedding, and meets a cute guy. Then she leaves in disgust when he immediately introduces himself as a member of the Furry Fandom, and goes on to enthusiastically describe the fandom as people who put on mascot costumes and yiff in hotel rooms. It seemed like the writers were being lazy and using the stereotypical view of furries, which seemed odd given their One of Us tendencies. Before the next scene was finished, I realized that the type of furry who is... socially impaired enough to walk up to a complete stranger and introduce himself like that probably has a warped view of the fandom. They normally don't clean up so well, but it still makes sense.
      • The real Fridge Brilliance of that scene is that the perverted furry at the wedding is played by the same actor who appeared earlier that season as Liz's dream guy, Astronaut Mike Dexter.
      • It's a Comedy show on NBC. It's pretty obvious its just simply that "furry" in that sense is "creepy nerds having sex in fur outfits" because that is what most people know. This isnt a furry webcomic who will want to portray being furry as completely normal, its an NBC Comedy.
  • In the college episode we see Jack feeling jealous that the Microwave department created this cool voice activated microwave without any input from him. A few episodes later he's trying to impress the new Kabletown exec with a voice activated remote, that unfortunately doesn't work as well as the microwave
  • Tracy Jordan has a son named Tracy Jr. The obvious assumption is that he's named after his father, but it is eventualy revealed that Tracy has a dog named Tracy Sr. Tracy Jr. isn't named after his father, he's named after his father's dog.