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Disclaimer: This is all just my own personal opinion.

For the DVD release of each season of 30 Rock, a handful of episodes would have an optional audio commentary track. One or more people involved with that episode would talk about what was going on onscreen, mention some behind-the-scenes trivia, and sometimes just joke around. I did not like them as much as I have liked commentary for other shows that I have seen, so I decided to rate each one, from 1-5, based on the following qualities:

::: spoiler Categories

1. Insightful
   • How insightful the comments would be, i.e. not just sharing opinions or jokes
   • Mentioning how much they enjoyed working with a particular actor or making a joke about a prop may be factual/topical/humorous, but I am not really learning anything from those comments
   • This is probably my favorite aspect of audio commentary, and the lack of insughtful commentary is likely why I was generally not very fond of 30 Rock's commentary
2. Factual
   • Whe

Season 5 Episodes 20-21 is a two-part episode titled "100". When it was originally broadcast, both parts were shown on the same night. I presume this is the cut that is included on the Blu-ray that I have: both parts combined into one long (42:18) continuous episode. But on other home media (including streaming services such as Peacock), and presumably in syndication, each of the two parts is instead recut into an individual episode with a running time of about 21:25 each. It seems that part one was originally a minute or so longer than part two, so part one had some jokes cut out and part two had some added in.

So, I nerded out a bit and played both versions side-by-side, taking note of the differences. Here are my findings:

::: spoiler Part one differences

I couldn't think of a single bad episode, so I was curious what other people thought was the worst. Both the pilot and the second Queen of Jordan were rated the worst, at 7.2. Still a pretty good rating!

• Note that the Y axis on each chart does not go from 0-10. They are all 7-9.5.
• Data source: IMDb
• Tools used: LibreOffice Calc, GIMP

::: spoiler Raw data