Since I’ve staggered things so that I’m not just stuck with one show to watch at a time, I decided it’d be good to keep track of my progress though each series. One is a show that all of the RTVW contributors have tried to convince me to watch over and over again, 30 Rock. The other is a show I loved when it was on the air and am currently trying to decide if it’s worth buying on DVD (I can’t ever seem to find it on sale making an impulse buy unlikely so I need to be sure I really want to pay full price for it), Popular. Let’s take a look at my thoughts on each after the first disc of each series.

30 Rock, S1, Disc 1: I need to admit up front that I rarely find Tina Fey funny. I’m aware that this makes me a freak among society but I can’t deny the truth. This a huge thing to struggle with when she’s not only playing the lead character but is also the creative force behind the show. I don’t get a lot of her humor at all and, so far, that hasn’t changed. The only episode I really found all that funny on this first disc was “Jack-Tor” and it was mostly the Snapple bit at the beginning that won me over. I find very little to like about Tracy but his pretending to be illiterate in that episode just to get out of having to work so much was amusing. At the moment, Jack and Kenneth are the two characters I actually enjoy. Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of a network suit is pitch perfect and there’s just something about Jack McBrayer that makes Kenneth (a character I would normally hate) work. Still, I’m hopeful that maybe I’ll start to see what everyone else loves and I’ll warm up to Liz once the second disc arrives.

Popular, S1, Disc 1: I’ll admit that for a minute or two there in the first two episodes on the disc, I wondered if my memories (and, therefore, my love) for this show were so hazy that I had forgotten what it was actually like. That was until the second half of the second episode started and the show became everything I remembered. Not that the pilot didn’t have some great moments but the show hadn’t quite found it’s feet yet so the things I remember so well weren’t quite in place. By the time I was done mainlining the disc, I was annoyed that I couldn’t immediately pop in the next disc. The only extras included on this disc were some trailers, which are naturally quite outdated but amusing nonetheless for the flashbacks you’ll experience watching them, and audio commentary on episodes. Stupid me, I completely forgot that I was going to be reviewing the DVD set so I forgot to watch the commentaries (and I think it was just one, on the pilot episode) but I promise to watch and report on the ones available on the rest of the discs! Overall, I’m really enjoying re-watching this series. I was going to comment on how quickly I became invested in the lives of these teenagers but I can’t honestly say if that’s true. After all, I have fond memories of them and that may be why I felt like I knew them right from the get-go this time. Still, I think the show does a pretty good job of making these kids seem real and that’s why you care about what’s happening to them. Some of the more “villainous” characters are still a little two-dimensional in these first few episodes and I’ll let you know if that changes as the season progresses.