I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned Battlestar Galactica (Friday nights on the Sci-Fi channel!) on this blog before. Considering my near-obsession with the show (okay, it’s a total obsession), I’m surprised I don’t mention it more often.
My favorite broadcast show of late, though, is definitely Tina Fey’s award-winning and uber-fantastic 30 Rock (Thursday nights on NBC). Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), c’est definitely moi. Funny, insecure, neurotic, passionate about her work, ambitious, creative, loud, opinionated — I mean, what can you not love about this woman? She’s a proud feminist chick who broke ground by becoming the first woman head writer at Saturday Night Live; who revitalized that tired old show with her memorable stints at the anchor desk on SNL’s Weekend Update (first with Jimmy Fallon, then with partner in crime Amy Poehler); who parlayed her sharp wit and even sharper intellect into a successful and critically-acclaimed prime-time sitcom; and who has now become a creative force to reckon with onscreen, first with the hugely popular Mean Girls, and now the box-office hit Baby Mama. Dear God, how could you not love her?
Liz Lemon is the complete opposite of my other hero, Battlestar Galactica‘s Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff). While Starbuck wouldn’t hesitate to deck a man — or even step into the boxing ring against him, as she did in Season 3 against hunky Jamie Barber’s Major Apollo — Lemon is more likely to alternate between yelling at him and throwing up in her office. She hates confrontation, but she can somehow manage to her the wild, undisciplined and rebellious cats who constitute her writing staff into creating a funny show week after week (30 Rock is about the shenanigans — love that word! — behind the scenes of an SNL-style variety show on NBC). Starbuck is a remarkable physical specimen: fierce, strong, nimble, with a commanding presence on the flight deck. She’s the best pilot Galactica has, and she knows it.
Lemon, on the other hand, likes to stroll on her treadmill while contentedly eating a pudding cup. She’s small, slight and curvy, and she loves nothing more than to wolf down a bag of orange cheese puffs. (Who doesn’t, right?) She knows she’s a great writer — she wouldn’t be where she is if she weren’t — but is ambivalent about her career and her ambitions. Heck, the woman contemplated moving to Cleveland to join her boyfriend, for God’s sake.
Still, I love love love her. She’s everything I am now (albeit with a better apartment and job), while Starbuck is everything I wish I could be. If I could do a mashup of those two women, I’d be happy. But then again, I could just as easily end up with a weird, dysfunctional hybrid.
Oh wait. In a way, even individually these two women, for all their strengths, are exactly that: weird and dysfunctional. And maybe that’s why I love them so much.
