30 Rock
Season 4 Premiere
Starring Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan
NBC, Thursdays at 9:30pm

Last season, I tuned into the 30 Rock premiere with high expectations, only to be met by the awkward-and-not-in-a-good-way SeinfeldVision. After a consistently hilarious second season, everything in SeinfeldVision felt off, as if the writers had suddenly changed focus. The episode proved to be the harbinger of a disappointing season that, while still occasionally brilliant, relied far too heavily on big-name guest stars while letting its strong supporting cast fall to the wayside.

Fortunately, this season’s premiere — the cutely named Season 4 — was a happier beginning. We got a good amount of time with all of the secondary characters, including the oft-forgotten Josh, as well as all the clever one-liners we could possibly expect from a half-hour of comedy (my favorite: Pete’s “Another actor? Why? They have so many feelings and opinions!” Okay, it’s in Scott Adsit’s delivery. It’s not as funny written down). Plus, Steve Buscemi! It had its flaws, however. The theme of the episode — drawing in more mainstream viewers — may be a bit too on-the-nose for some, considering 30 Rock’s notoriously low ratings. And it wasn’t a standout episode for any of the main cast, Kenneth in particular. But I’ll get to that later [...]

Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen, and Olivia Thirlby star in this drama set in the mid-90s from director Jonathan Levine.

Angie “Bitch Happy” Han takes us into the world of Jorge Vega’s Gunplay, the 2007 Platinum Studios Comic Book Challenge winner about a Civil War buffalo soldier whose curse compels him to kill one person every day of his life. Creepy!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes the case for an unlikely but fruitful link between haute couture and comic books with the Costume Institute’s new exhibit, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.

Geeks of Doom met with a lot of great, hardworking independent comic creators during this year’s New York Comic Con. Here is the first installment of our series of reviews for the nearly 20 lbs. of books we came away with after all the smoke cleared.

Check out our round-up of the best and worst of New York Comic Con 2008.