Every Pete Hornburger Subplot on 30 Rock, Ranked: Season Two
Previously in 30 Rock coverage:
HBO’s Succession As Prophesied by the Season-Two 30 Rock Episode “Succession”
Every Pete Hornburger Subplot on 30 Rock, Ranked: Season One
Tracking The Finances of 30 Rock and Sex and the City
Every Time Liz Lemon Is Almost Gay Or Something (”Or Something”) On 30 Rock
In Pete Hornberger, 30 Rock can show us Liz Lemon’s shadow. They are more alike than otherwise: Practical, hardworking, (usually) competent at work and nowhere else, sarcastic, critical, the most successful iteration of a theater tech graduate. By the end of season one he has begun literally wearing her clothes, and there is not even a period-typical crossdressing joke in the plotline; Pete and Liz can wear the same clothes without raising gender anxiety, which is all the more remarkable for 30 Rock’s tendency to find gender anxiety in almost anything.
He “has it all” in terms of career and family, and has been destroyed by everything she wants. By season two, Liz has already begun to fret that she has waited too long to have children, while Pete met his wife in college (“Paula and I got married our sophomore year. She got pregnant twenty minutes into our first date”) and he’s been completely defeated by his own family. He’s alternately frightened of and weirded out by his own children (Kyle is too strong, there’s an unnamed “creepy little one” who’s “always rubbing himself against the carpet,” and no one seems entirely sure on how many children he has until later seasons), and his wife only likes him when he’s staying at Liz’ apartment and wearing her sweaters. We’ve seen in season one what happens to a relaxed version of Liz, who lets her guard and her standards down for just a minute: she ends up with Dennis.
Whatever version of Liz stuck with Dennis the first time around, and really did end up having kids with him (“I know what that phone call means. All of my sisters got that phone call junior year of high school…Pre, before. Natal, ruined”), would be Pete Hornberger. Totally subsumed by chaos, hating her life, looking to fake her own death; she’s saved by her own criticizing, carping worst habits, and is much better off kidnapping babies and faking adoption interviews.
Liz and Pete are both caught midpoint between being a boss and being a loser, defaulting to whichever category would be funnier in any given moment, which is why Pete gets storylines in season two that vary from sensible, irritated buzzkill (“Transfers? Demerits?” he asks derisively when he busts up Kenneth and Donnie’s “page-off” in “Rosemary’s Baby.” “This is a billion-dollar company!1 Get back to work!”) to “fly getting squashed” (as when he gets his arm trapped in a vending machine over a Soy Joy in “MILF Island” and manages to dial his own number while calling for help. But by season two, even as Pete’s storylines become more seriously crowded out in favor of Jack, the writers realize they can do a lot more with Pete’s loserdom than they can with Liz. They’re able to degrade him to much greater depths.
Like Liz, Pete knows that positive change is impossible. Jack clocks Liz’ intermittent attempts at self-improvement in the pilot (“You buy any magazine that says “healthy body image on the cover, and every two years you take up knitting for…a week”) and by season four she has “lost faith [even] in decorganizing.” In season five she, very. much like Pete, pins all her hopes on becoming someone new and wonderful by wearing a hat at conspicuous odds with her usual style (a hat that “a KISS FM DJ once called ‘a sweet lid’”).
It’s in season two that we see the beginning of Pete’s desperate hope of total personal transformation via hat, in fact.
