'30 Rock': The 10 best episodes

The NBC series '30 Rock,' created by Tina Fey, airs its final installment tonight. Check out our picks for the 10 best of its episodes.

6. 'Tracy Does Conan,' season 1, episode 7

Ali Goldstein/NBC/AP
Tina Fey (l.) stars on '30 Rock'

This episode is on a lot of top 10 lists, and rightly so. The main reason (in our opinion) for its status as a critics' favorite is the introduction of Dr. Leo Spaceman (Chris Parnell), pronounced Spa-cheh-min. Spaceman is a wildly inappropriate doctor without any sense of decorum or timing. In other plotlines, Jenna Maroney gets booted from a "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" guest spot in favor of Tracy, and Tracy begins hallucinating right before he's about to go on "Late Night." Liz and company scramble to get him his medicine and shove him onto the show, where he promptly falls asleep.

Conan O'Brien's guest spot is great, but Leo Spaceman became an instant classic.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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