The 30 Rock Team Is at the Top of Its Game in NBC’s The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins

The best way to spend a Thursday night circa 2010 was to park yourself in front of an NBC comedy lineup that featured The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community. All four shows have since become classics. But some have had more influence on the network-sitcom landscape—one that has never been the same since they ended—than others. The Office and its direct descendant Parks and Rec gave rise to a generation of sweet, faintly progressive mockumentaries: Modern Family, Abbott Elementary, St. Denis Medical. Last year, Peacock unveiled a confoundingly dated Office spinoff, The Paper.

Having always preferred the darker, more manic and referential humor of 30 Rock and Community, I’ve found the relative scarcity of that style disappointing. So I’m extra delighted to report that The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins—an NBC sitcom, premiering Feb. 23, that stars Tracy Morgan and is co-created by Robert Carlock, a longtime collaborator of executive producer Tina Fey—is network TV’s first worthy heir to 30 Rock. What that show was to SNL, this one is to the NFL. The surprise is that it also smartly cribs from The Office’s playbook.

One key ingredient of any Feyworld comedy is a cast of characters that balances incongruous, frequently delusional personalities: neurotics, fools, cynics, innocents. Morgan, in the title role of a football star desperate to redeem himself two decades after he accidentally confessed on live TV that he’d gambled on his own game, plays a more tender, athlete version of his wildcard 30 Rock comedian. Too ashamed to show his face in public, Reggie putters around a mansion that shrewd business decisions by his manager, agent, and ex, Monica (the great Erika Alexander, in Living Single mode) have allowed him to hang on to. The former spouses co-parent an ingenuous teen, Carmelo (Jalyn Hall). Rounding out this nontraditional family are Reggie’s younger, aspiring-musician fiancée, Brina (Precious Way), and basement-dwelling best buddy, Bobby Moynihan’s Rusty, a goofy NFL never-was.

In hopes of repairing his reputation, Reggie hires an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Daniel Radcliffe’s Arthur Tobin, to direct a flattering doc about him. But Tobin is too principled to make an infomercial. Monica doubts this highbrow Brit is capable of understanding Reggie’s rags-to-riches-to-infamy tale. In fact, Tobin knows as well as anyone what it’s like to commit career suicide. A hilarious, faux-amateur video shows him melting down on the set of a Marvel movie. Everyone in this story could use a fresh start.

Reggie Dinkins is, more or less, a mockumentary, albeit one that adds a layer of self-awareness by putting the director inside the frame. It also shares with the Parks and Rec cohort a lovable cast of characters. There are fun villains; Reggie’s nemesis is a sneakily vicious NFL alum (Craig Robinson) with the splendid name Jerry Basmati. But on Team Reggie, there’s no ruthless Jack Donaghy, no narcissistic Jenna Maroney.

Maybe that’s a canny concession to the present, when real-life monsters make it harder to laugh along with monstrous characters. Fey and Carlock’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a black comedy about a woman recovering from years of abuse at the hands of a cult-leader captor, isn’t exactly topping my 2026 rewatch list.

For the most part, though, their hyper style has aged well. Quick cutaways to vertical videos or schlocky ads or an ESPN-style panel show called Sports Shouting echo our screen-mediated reality. Pop culture geekery remains the lingua franca of Feyworld, diving down rabbit holes on Russell Crowe’s band and the Korean radical-feminist movement 4B. Reggie’s favorite procedural is called FDNY: Chicago (solemn narrator: “In the New York Fire Department, there is a special unit that fights fires in Chicago”). The unhinged brilliance of peak-era 30 Rock might be impossible
to recreate. But in its first season, Reggie Dinkins already qualifies as a hell of a comeback.