30 rock
the break-up (8/21)

Continuing tonight is the Golden Globe- and Emmy award-winning sitcom following the fortunes of long-suffering TV comedy writer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey). In tonight’s episode, Liz finally breaks up with Dennis, Jack has trouble with a mystery girlfriend and Tracy and Toofer fall out.

After getting home to find Dennis knocking holes in the wall, a huge dog sniffing around and a friend of Dennis’s laid up in her bed with a broken leg, Liz has finally had enough of her loser boyfriend and tells him that it is over. Jenna is delighted when she hears the news, announcing that she is going to take her out on a man-hunting expedition to a classy karaoke bar.

Liz is not too happy with Jenna’s plan, but when she gets to work she finds out that she is not the only person at 30 Rockefeller Plaza with love-life problems. Jack informs her that he has been seeing a certain “high-ranking African-American member of the Bush administration” and wants Liz’s advice on what to buy her as a gift. Later, he phones Liz to tell her that he thinks, based on an apparently incriminating piece of news footage, that his mystery woman is cheating on him. “I know what I know,” he insists grimly. “Next time I see Putin, I’m gonna kick his teeth in.”

Aside from Jack and Liz’s romantic woes, there is more trouble on the set of ‘TGS with Tracy Jordan’. When Toofer spots Tracy getting into a dress for a sketch, he tells him that performing in drag is demeaning for a black man. “I played a woman before,” protests Tracy. “‘Honky Grandma Be Trippin’’ made $96 million!” But when Toofer points out that this kind of thing would never have happened on cult show ‘Black Frasier’, Tracy refuses to do the sketch. Josh volunteers to replace him: “My parents raised me as a girl for, like, ten years!”

Unfortunately, Tracy soon regrets his decision and confronts Toofer about the issue, pointing out the success that many black performers –such as Eddie Murphy –have had. When Liz notices that the two have fallen out, she tells Toofer that he is going to have to come up with something new for Tracy or they are going to have a problem. The solution appears to be for Toofer and Tracy to write the sketch together, but things between the polar opposite pair soon get tense, culminating in a mention of the ‘N word’ that gets both of them sent to a ‘sensitivity training’ workshop. Can the pair work things out before the show suffers?

Elsewhere, Jenna’s attempt to get Liz back on the dating scene backfires when she realises that her friend is a little rusty at meeting new men. Jack makes a decision about his mystery woman. And Dennis surprises everyone when he turns up at the office and reads Liz a moving farewell note. After he leaves, everyone starts to wonder if Liz has done the right thing by breaking up with Dennis –is he actually a good guy after all? But when Liz sees him on a TV show entitled ‘To Catch a Predator’, she realises that she has made the right call...