Playing Jack Donaghy for seven seasons, Alec Baldwin is 30 Rock's rock. But in a new interview, the actor says he nearly parted way with the Tina Fey-created comedy over what he felt was a quality control issue in the writers room.
"It was a low point," Baldwin tells Rolling Stone in a new cover story. "Though even anemic 30 Rock writing is still better than everybody else’s writing. I go, ‘I’m going to get the f---k out of here, I’m done,’ because I’m an employee, I don’t have any say. So season five ends, and I’m saying ‘Next year, I’m done,’ then I come back, and season six is really good, we all had fun."
Of course, Baldwin's conflicted feelings about the show are nothing new. The actor has publicly threatened to leave 30 Rock in the past, most recently with a tweet from April 2012 in which he wrote, "I think I'm leaving NBC just in time." It was a bluff.
This time around, however, Baldwin thinks its the show's star and creator who was ready to move on.
"Tina always had her antenna up," Baldwin says. "But this year was the first time she came in and laid down on the couch on set, and you could tell, she's a mom. She's f---ing wiped out."
Fey, fresh off a triumphant turn co-hosting the Golden Globes with Amy Poehler, admits the show went far longer than even she expected.
"I feel like we made a lot of good episodes of the kind of show that usually gets canceled. The kind where there's 20 episodes and 'only me and my hipster friends know about it.' That part's still true. But we made about 140 of them!," she tells Rolling Stone.
