This year 30 Rock became the first comedy to win consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series in 10 years. The second season, which also won Emmys for stars Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, will be released on DVD tomorrow with all 15 episodes and plenty of bonus features to make the listed price of $37.99 more than fair.

The two-disc set is full of plenty of audio commentaries, deleted scenes, and, perhaps best of all, a recording of 30 Rock Live, the staged reading of one of the episodes the cast performed at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater to benefit the show's crew during the writers' strike.

Season 2 of 30 Rock featured countless memorable guest stars, and one of the surprising treats of the DVD set is that some of those guest stars make appearances during the audio commentaries, something few shows do. Will Arnett and Tim Conway (in his Emmy-winning guest role) are quite funny, but the true highlight is Fred Armisen, who does a solo commentary that turns into a rambling hyperbolic speech about how a TV show works. He uses every improv skill he has to fill the entire episode with comments as banal as pointing out absent continuity errors and telling apocryphal stories about the decision for his character's apartment number.

But if you only listen to one audio commentary on this set, make sure it's the one with Tina Fey and 30 Rock music supervisor (and Fey's husband) Jeff Richmond on “Episode 210.” The episode was the last one written before the writers' strike and was filmed during it, so Fey and Richmond provide great insight into what that time was like for writers and actors. They also explain the fact that the episode has no title, because after the strike, Fey and the rest of the 30 Rock writing staff were so terrified of breaking the rules that they refused to do anything that might seem inappropriate, from ad-libbing during filming to even providing an actual title for the episode.

If tons of great audio commentaries aren't your cup of tea, the 30 Rock season 2 DVD includes two very impressive home video segments. The first is a behind-the-scenes look at Fey's return to Saturday Night Live as host. The second is a recorded version of 30 Rock Live, a special stage show the cast did to raise money for their crew during the strike. The audio quality on it is pretty bad because it wasn't professionally recorded, but even through tape, the chance to see the entire cast of 30 Rock perform one of the show's scripts in front of a live audience is something only a handful of people got to experience.

With her pitch-perfect impression of Governor Sarah Palin, Tina Fey is still riding high, and this DVD comes at just the right time to get on the Fey bandwagon if you aren't already and to tide fans over until season 3 premieres on October 30 at 9:30p on NBC.


-John Kubicek, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image courtesy of NBC)