Dog shoots woman, MILF Manor and microdramas: 30 Rock predicted the future too

OK, so there was a crazy story yesterday. One of those headlines that elicits a double-take as you’re scrolling down the page.

“Dog in parked car accidentally shoots woman with shotgun”. First reaction: How? Second: Must be in America!

Correct, of course it was in the US, because of so many reasons. As for the how, there was a loaded shotgun (again, America) lying in the backseat of a truck (which we take to mean a ute) along with a dog, parked in front of a convenience store.

It’s starting to sound like a riddle but it was as simple as the dog moved from one side of the truck to the other which triggered the shotgun which had a live round in the chamber and it fired and hit an unlucky woman who was stopped at a nearby red light. She was hit in the arm and, thankfully, it was not life-threatening.

It was a real Rube Goldberg-ian confluence of events that was too ludicrous to ever imagine, except someone already had: the writing staff of 30 Rock.

If you’re a 30 Rock fan, you would have immediately recognised the above scenario as one of the show’s throwaway jokes from its second season in 2007.

That was the backstory of Celeste Cunningham, the fictional Democrat congresswoman, love interest of Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) and Sheinhardt wig enthusiast played by Edie Falco.

CC, as she’s known on the show, was shot in the face by a dog, and it was that experience that inspired her to get into politics. It was all dramatised in the TV movie-within-the-show, A Dog Took My Face and Gave Me a Better Face to Change the World: The Celeste Cunningham Story.

30 Rock even filmed a cutaway of that film, which featured Kristin Wiig playing Candace Van Der Shark playing CC. In the scene, she wasn’t in a parked car and the dog wasn’t in a ute, but there was a longarm weapon and a dog (“Hey hun, have you seen my hunting rifle?”, “Last time I saw it, the dog had it”, and then bam!).

Tina Fey’s comedy has actually been quite prophetic on a number of things, and never seems to get the credit like The Simpsons does for “predicting” the future.

Obviously there’s no woo-woo clairvoyancy involved, a lot of the times it’s just clever writers who have followed a thread of something they’ve observed about the world, taking it to an absurd conclusion, and our times are nothing if not absurd.

Even in this scenario with the dog and the shotgun, the 30 Rock gag was a commentary on the distressing stupidity of American gun culture. The fact that it eventuated is hilarious but also calamitous.

That same year as the dog shotgun joke, 30 Rock also foreshadowed the dominance of mobile videos, and more specifically, microdramas and the short-lived platform Quibi.

It was delivered through Devon Banks, Jack’s TV executive rival played by Will Arnett, who was trying to pitch new ideas to secure himself the top job. His big thing was 10-second internet sitcoms for your mobile phone.

In 2007, that was still kind of ridiculous. YouTube had only been around for two years at that point, and Netflix had launched a very small selection for streaming in January, although it would be years before it embarked on originals.

Now, TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels would probably love it if you stayed for 10 seconds on a single video instead of scrolling off after three.

Everyone is obsessed with mobile content now – and we’re using the word “content”, that beloved catch-all for everyone who doesn’t appreciate the difference between a feature film and an influencer’s sponsored post, to reflect the slop.

In 2020, Quibi was launched by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman to go after mobile-first audiences with highly produced shows and movies that were delivered in short bursts. It was too expensive and they didn’t get it right, and it folded after a few months, losing almost $US2 billion in the process.

That audience behaviour was there, but Quibi wasn’t the right approach, at least from a business perspective, and now microdramas are surging.

Microdramas are those cheaply produced “TV shows” of mostly romance soap-opera stories that are spliced into one-minute episodes. They’re vertically framed, feature unknown and non-unionised actors, who can then make a name for themselves within the industry, and shot incredibly quickly.

Each “episode” is super dramatic and can feature within one 60-second block, a betrayal, a violent act and a cliffhanger. Usually the first handful of episodes are free, and then viewers have to subscribe to watch the rest.

Devon Banks would be so proud.

In the case of MILF Manor, it feels less like a prediction and more like plagiarism.

30 Rock had a fake show-within-the-show called MILF Island, which was presented as lowest common denominator TV, appealing to an audience’s worst instincts. In the series, a group of older women and young boys are in a Survivor-style set-up.

Fast-forward to 2023 and now MILF Manor is a real show, in which eight mums aged 40 to 60 and their eight adult sons travel to a villa in Mexico and cross-date each other. Not even Liz Lemon could roll her eyes back far enough. It ran for two seasons. Yikes.

There were a bunch of other prophetic gags too, including the problems surrounding an attempt at a Janis Joplin biopic, the Tracy Jordan Meat Machine (but instead of two steaks smooshed together, KFC went with two chicken patties), Dr Spaceman being appointed US Surgeon-General (the actual one now, Casey Means, is not much better qualified), clear-fronted dishwashers, and Octavia Spencer being involved in a Harriet Tubman biopic (in 30 Rock, she starred in it, in real life, she was a producer).

But our favourite 30 Rock prediction has to be the one that Fey made happen herself.

In the show, Liz gives Jenna a fake award for “Best Actress in a Movie Based on a Musical Based on a Movie”, for her turn in Mystic Pizza: The Musical: The Movie, which doesn’t exist, thankfully.

In 2024, Fey released a movie she co-wrote, Mean Girls, which many people thought was a remake of her 2004 teen comedy.

But it was actually a film adaptation of the Mean Girls stage musical that was born from the original movie.

In other words, a movie based on a musical based on a movie.