30 Rock: A One-Time Special exposed everything that's wrong with TV right now

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/07/30-rock-special-reunion-nbc-upfront

The one-hour reunion special that also served to promote NBC Universal programming and the launch of the Peacock streaming service was not only bad, it was excruciating, says Sonia Saraiya. "30 Rock, in its heyday, skewered its parent company’s self-mythologizing, its multiple subsidiaries, its desperate efforts to make hay out of corporate synergy," says Saraiya. "In this zombie reunion special, all of 30 Rock’s charm and wit was devoted to cohering NBCUniversal’s brand identity into some kind of shared 'universe,' despite offerings that include professional wrestling, TV news, the Olympics, The Office, the Real Housewives franchise, several Law & Order spinoffs, and Gwen Stefani. Here is the great promise of TV in 2020: A packet of disparate forms of distraction, bound together by sizzle reels, the reanimated corpses of characters you once cared for, and vague promises of the healing power of live sports. Slate’s Sam Adams tweeted that the special 'feels like a funeral for television,' and that rang true for me, too. It wasn’t just the depressing conflation of scripted TV and literal advertisement, though that didn’t help. The corporate synergy on display also emphasized how the actual quality of what we watch has diminished even as the quantity of available programming has ballooned past reckoning. Last year, I wrote about how our attention has become so profitable that media giants are spending billions to silo us into their particular streaming platform. (On Thursday night), NBCUniversal’s ad-episode-sizzle felt like the literal embodiment of the attention economy’s race to the bottom. If the conglomerate’s individual programs have any power or significance—and Khloé Kardashian’s humorless cameo in the middle of the special was a reminder that that’s a big if — it was diluted or glossed or spun into a montage that funneled into our eyeballs and earholes coated with syrupy, disingenuous schmaltz. This Is Us? This is yikes."