Heartwarming / 30 Rock

• The friendship that develops between Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy provides a number of these. One of the best is in the second season finale, when Jack, in D.C. working for the Bush administration, is left a number of voicemails by Lemon stressing out over a pregnancy scare. After he listens to them, he shows up at her door, tells her, "I'm sorry you had to go through this alone," and offers to help her begin the adoption process. All this from two characters who kind of hated each other at first sight.
  • The season four Valentine's Day episode that had Liz scheduling a root canal for V-Day, because she didn't need a man in her life. Except the dentist's office requires someone to drive Liz home since she's going to be on anesthesia (and she does exhibit some fun side effects, including cuddling the office plants and mistaking the dental assistants for her three ex-boyfriends). They call her emergency contact - Jack, who has been attempting to romance a political pundit who won't take him seriously - and he immediately drops everything to come pick Liz up and take her home.
    • Not to forget, in the same episode Avery asks the intoxicated Liz how she feels about Jack. Her reply: "He's the best one. I don't know what I would do with out him."
  • The season five episode, "Mrs. Donaghy," had them falling out after they (accidentally) married each other. HR intervenes with a series of questions that make them realise just how important their friendship is to each other:
    Have you spent time with each other's families? Have you attended special events together, such as class reunions, birthday or holiday celebrations, weddings, or extended car trips? Are you each other's emergency contacts? Do you ever drink together at work, perhaps while summarizing what you've learned over the day or week? Have you shared intimate details of your fears, hopes, and dreams, both personal and professional? Is this the longest and perhaps most meaningful relationship in your life?
• This bittersweet exchange between Jack and Nancy, after they negotiate Jack to four parting words after acknowledging their unrequited attraction.
  Jack: "I'll wait, not forever."
• The scene where Jack, who is trying to prove to Kenneth that no one is really moral when tested, gets a bunch of people to rig the elevator to break down and play a trick on him, saying that there's only enough oxygen in the elevator for eight people to survive and since there's nine in the elevator, one person has to die (and mentions there's a gun conveniently located in the phonebox). The fact that Kenneth is gullible enough to believe him is a Funny Moment. The fact that he doesn't hesitate for a second before grabbing the gun and trying to shoot himself in the head to save Jack and the others is the Heartwarming. Jack, it should be noted, is completely shaken by this display.
• Believe it or not, Kenneth's drunken rant at the end of season 4.
  Kenneth: "I'll see YOU ALL IN HEAVEN!"
• Kenneth's naivete and pollyanna personality are often played for laughs, but there are times when his idealism and good nature becomes genuinely heartwarming.
  Kenneth: [speaking about a rival he's known for a few days] He's my best friend! Tied with everyone else I've ever met!"
• Jack and Liz are renegotiating contracts, and Jack realizes that he loses out on the deal because he cares too much about Liz. He uses this to his advantage to prove he could still beat her, but signs the favorable contract anyway.
  Jack: [offhand] I still want you to have everything.
• Jack Donaghy finally gets his job back at the beginning of Season 3, and Liz is on her way out the door of his office when she stops and looks behind. When Jack asks her what's wrong, she replies "nothing, I just like seeing you in there."
• Liz ends up showing sincere concern for and friendship to Jack as the show goes along, and some moments can make one feel a little fuzzy inside - though it's not long before the snark snaps you out of it.
• Liz deciding in "It's Never Too Late for Now" that the enormous office conspiracy to get Liz a one-night stand means everyone knows her extremely well and really cares about her happiness.
• The Season 5 Christmas Episode, especially at the end when Jack deliberately annoys his parents just to have them yell at him - like a normal family. His contented smile says it all.
  • Followed by a genuinely sweet sequence in which Paul and Jenna sing a Christmas carol while Liz returns to her family.
• Regardless of how surreal it is, Jack's conversation with Don Geiss' soul inside the body of a peacock in "Argus" is surprisingly touching. Jack emotionally tells him that he was the father he never had and he lays a sympathetic wing on his lap.
• In season 2, episode 3 "The Collection", Jack needs to give up his enormous cookie jar collection to ensure he won't be though to as too weird to be GE's CEO. Jack agrees at first, but when he finds out the cookie jars will be destroyed, he changes his mind. In conversation with Liz, Jack explains (while being in deep denial) that he collects cookie jars because his mother never made her children cookies because she thought they didn't deserve them. At the end of the episode, Jack talks to Kenneth, who mentions he also likes cookie jars, also due to childhood issues with his mother and Kenneth explains that he felt like he could put his put his problems inside the cookie jar and "never, ever, ever" let them out-Jack is very clearly touched by this, and happily gives Kenneth his collection.
• The Season 4 Christmas Episode when Danny deliberately sings off-key just to please Jenna during their duet.
• Jack's reaction to his phone messages from Liz during the Season 2 finale and then traveling all the way from Washington D.C. to her apartment in New York in the middle of the night after realizing she needed a friend to talk with.
• What does Don Geiss tell his employees to do in the event of a financial meltdown in "Larry King"? "We've all worked hard, but now it's over. There's only one thing for you to do... go to your loved ones. Hold them close; because, in the end, and if you're watching this, it is the end, love is all that matters."
• At the end of Season 6, Liz tells Jack (usually a ceaseless fountain of unsolicited advice) that she's finally ready to have a child of her own, but Jack, humbled by the failure of his second marriage, does not feel qualified to mentor her, instead just telling her that she'll be a great mother. But Liz asks for his advice anyway, in an honest display of admiration and friendship, and Jack, in an equal display of friendship, obliges.
• In season 5, episode "100", during a series of flashbacks it is revealed that Jack originally didn't want to fire Pete in "Pilot", he wanted to fire Liz. This was meant to solidify the growth Liz and Jack's friendship over the past 5 years. However, in the same flashback Pete shows how much he cares for Liz - he tells Jack that if he fires Liz, he would quit, which is what prompts Jack to fire him instead, a selfless act for which Pete never takes credit. Unfortunately we aren't shown whether Liz thanks Pete later on after finding this out.
• In the season four episode "Sun Tea", Tracy and Jack's experiences while waiting for their vasectomies are a triple Heartwarmer. Jack bonds with Tracy's son, who loves his dad so much that he's basing a project for school on him. Tracy realizes he wants a baby girl before he gets the operation because he genuinely wants another child. Finally, Jack's experience leads him to stop the operation on Tracy and decide he may still want a child himself.
• In the episode "Mazel Tov, Dummies!" after Liz tells Tracy that she's getting married, he immediately breaks into an enormous, heartfelt grin. And immediately after, he shrugs off a car hitting him in order to tell her to get going.
  • Also from "Mazel Tov, Dummies!", is the scene where Criss manages to get Liz to admit that yes, her wedding day is important to her and she shouldn't hide the fact that she wants it to be special. Among the days Liz suggests she values more are the days TGS got picked up, the day she got an all-pink sleeve of Starbursts, and the day she met Criss.
• After hearing about how much Kenneth loves NBC and what it means to him Jack makes Kenneth the new CEO of NBC.
• In "Succession," Jack promoted Liz. One of the first things Liz did was tell Pete she'd promote him and give him a huge raise.
• Liz and Criss adopting eight-year old twins in "A Goon's Deed in a Weary World." It gets even more heartwarming when it turns out that Janet and Terry are Jenna and Tracy in miniature, and Liz, who's wanted a child for some time now, tearfully says that it "seems about right." They appear later in the epilogue during Take Your Black Kid to Work Day on the set of Grizz & Herz quietly doing their homework, implying that their parents have managed to eliminate in their children the numerous problems that made Tracy and Jenna so hard to work with.
• In the finale, Jack loves Liz . . . like their Anglo-Saxon forebears would have loved each other:
  Jack: Lemon, there is a word, a once special word that’s been tragically co-opted by the romance industrial complex, and I would hate to use it here and have you think that I am suggesting any type of romantic sentiment, let alone an invitation to scale bone mountain. It’s a word that comes to us by way of the old high German "luba" from the Latin "lubera" meaning "to be pleasing." So I’m going to use this word to describe how I feel about you in the way that our Anglo-Saxon forefathers would have used it in reference to say "hot bowl of bear meat" or "your enemy's skull split."
  Liz: I love you too, Jack.
  • In the finale, Tracy spends almost the whole episode looking for Kenneth/trying to get in touch with him which is made 100x more difficult since Kenneth is president of NBC. It seems like Tracy is just being his usual needy self. But when he finally finds him, it's so that Tracy can release Kenneth from his promise of always being there for Tracy, knowing that otherwise, Kenneth might spend more time and effort on Tracy rather than on more important things.
    • However, the entire reason Tracy suffers severe abandonment issues gets closure, as his father returns from getting cigarettes. It's one of the only times Tracy is ever unconditionally happy.
  • The final scene; we zoom out of a snow globe of 30 Rock and see Kenneth discussing the idea of a 30 Rock TV show with a "Miss Lemon". It seems like a send up of the controversial ending of St. Elsewhere, in which it was All Just a Dream. But then we see flying cars going past Kenneth's window, and realize it is the future; the "Miss Lemon" is actually Liz's descendant, basing a show on the stories her great grandmother told her. She tells Kenneth this and he (looking no older, by the way) says "I know... and I love it!"
• "Cerie, you heard the man. Blimpie's."
• When we find out that despite his strip club attendance and other shenanigans, Tracy is actually completely loyal to his wife and they are very much in love.
• We also find out in the last episode Tracy is sabotaging the show because... he doesn't want to say goodbye.
• In '"Verna", Jenna's abusive mother Verna claims to have changed and wants to make amends. When Jack discovers Verna is really only there to use Jenna to get a reality television deal, he decides not to spoil Jenna's illusions and instead strikes a deal with Verna to pay her $12,000 a year (plus a tarp for her washing machine) to act like a good mother and visit on four holidays.
• The friendship between Tracy and Kenneth in general.
• In "The Natural Order" Jack has regretted for years that he never called his father out his mistreatment of his mother, and makes an effort to be kind to Colleen on the anniversary of Jimmy walking out on the family. In turn, when Colleen realizes that Jack has been holding onto this for all this time, she reassures him that Jimmy doesn't deserve to be thought about at all and that Jack is nothing like him (for good reason, as it turns out).

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