Nancy Pelosi is tonight's final guest on 30 Rock and that's as it should be. She's a funny, colorful character, a grandmother who, since Hillary Clinton stepped aside from the State Department this week, is probably the most powerful woman in the US. As such she's right up Tina Fey's creative alley. 
 
 Many of 30 Rock's funniest moments have been about female stereotypes "juggling" their identity alongside work-life balance. Much of the hype surrounding the end of the series has been about what it has done for the image of women. That all sounds a little worthy. Maybe it could be enough to have made us laugh at ourselves. So here are some highlights of the funniest "feminist" scenes. 
 
 1. In the pilot Jack Donaghy's (Alec Baldwin) first description of Liz Lemon: "New York, third wave feminist, college educated, single and pretending to be happy about it, over-scheduled and undersexed, you buy any magazine that says 'healthy body image' on the cover, and every two years you take up knitting for – about a week." 
 
 2. In The Baby Show teenage receptionist Ceri explains why she's getting engaged to a guy she's only been dating for two months: "We want to have babies while it's still cool." 
 
 3. In season 5, TGS Hates Women, Fey takes on Jezebel with a parody website JoanofSnark.com. Best line: "I support women. I'm like a human bra." 
 
 4. In season 3, episode 3, Jennifer Aniston plays Jenna and Liz's manic "I'm just being fun and spontaneous" friend from Chicago, Claire Harper. She immediately sleeps with Jack then stalks him. 
 
 "I made you a white pizza and a pot roast because I just think you're so amazing. Look at me playing house, my God, you must think I'm OUT OF MY MIND." 
 
 5. In a Season 6 episode, Murphy Brown Lied To Us, Donaghy sets Liz up on a play date with the daughter of an NBC executive to encourage her to have kids. "The country needs a few more Liz Lemons. I don't care how you do it," he says. "I don't care if you join the Big Sisters and torture inner city girls about punctuation. Any amount of Lemon is better than the crap we're turning out." 
 
 6. As the single, fading B (C?) list star Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) gets to be in every good anti-aging scene: 
 
 For example: 
 
 Season 3, Episode 15 
 
 Jenna: Everyone shout out phrases that describe my beauty. 
 
 Pete Hornberger: Fading. 
 
 Cerie: '80s. 
 
 Richard F Esposito: 1880s 
 
 Season 4 Episode 13 
 
 Jenna: You know what I realized? Maynard was the longest relationship of my life, after Doug. 
 
 Kenneth: Please don't say who Doug– 
 
 Jenna: Doug is my vibrator. 
 
 Season 1 Episode 5 
 
 Jenna: I am gonna get back at them ... using my sexuality. 
 
 Liz: Do you have any left? 
 
 But 30 Rock hasn't just been about jokes. The show has put a solid number of working actresses and singers to work over the years as guest stars. From Edie Falco, Julianne Moore, Carrie Fisher, Queen Latifah, Elizabeth Banks, Sherri Shepherd, Patti Lupone, Padma Kakshmi, Oprah Winfrey, Elaine Strich, Margaret Cho, Cynthia Nixon all the way through to Barbara Walters, Fey created a showcase for women to be funny. 
 
 The best work-life balance joke of the series was in casting her own seven-year-old daughter, Alice, to play the childhood Liz in this season's episode Mazel-Tov Dummies, executive produced by Fey's husband, Jeff Richmond. Alice Richmond and 30 Rock are the same age. The episode was the one in which Liz finally got married. 
 
 Mazel tov, Fey. ||||| As the final episode of 30 Rock approaches tonight, and America prepares to bid its harried, comedy-star-herding heroine a last blerg-bye, Liz Lemon is already being celebrated by the media as one of the more memorable female characters in the history of television. 
 
 Tributes are being paid. Lists of her memorable quotes have been assembled. Her image recently appeared in the supporting Lois Lane role on the cover of Rolling Stone, prompting outraged blog posts because – hello? – Liz Lemon, not Jack Donaghy, is our Superman. 
 
 None of this is surprising. While the audience for 30 Rock was never massive, among many affection for the show and Liz Lemon has always run deep. From the moment Lemon first appeared in the 2006 30 Rock pilot, bought every hot dog from a street vendor’s stand to shut up a rude New York businessman, then gave away those wieners to the tune of a song reminiscent of the theme from “That Girl,” we have expected Liz Lemon and Tina Fey, the show’s creator and Lemon’s real-life alter ego, to usher in a fresh, fruitful era for funny ladies on television. 
 
 If our Tina – first female head writer for Saturday Night Live and the stinging satirist behind the movie Mean Girls – could be put in charge of her own show about a woman who’s also in charge of her own show, then surely this would lead to a TV landscape in which, to borrow the title of Fey’s book, a lot of 
 
 ladies would soon be walking across our LED screens wearing bossypants. At least that was the hope. Now, with all 138 30 Rock episodes in the can and just that one final send-off left to air, this seems like a good time to ask: Did the existence of Liz Lemon actually change anything for women on television? 
 
 Fey’s 30 Rock success – and let’s define success here by the show’s longevity, quality and accolades, not its often pitiful ratings – just so happened to occur on the front end of what has been a very encouraging time for women working in the industry. More high-profile comedies – from Girls to The Big C to Enlightened to The New Girl and The Mindy Project, which serve as anchors for Fox’s Tuesday night comedy block – are being created or co-created by women and placing dynamic, dysfunctional and funny female characters at the center of their narratives. 
 
 Shows that weren’t necessarily invented by women – Parks and Recreation and Veep – also have generated buzz while casting women as central figures in powerful positions. Are Tina Fey and/or Liz Lemon responsible for this? 
 
 Maybe not directly. 
 
 But many of the women riding this wave, like Kaling and Fey’s friend and partner in Golden Globes-hosting, genius Amy Poehler, would likely cite Fey’s simultaneously self-deprecating and cutting sensibility – both on 30 Rock and in her previous work – as an inspiration for their own. 
 
 In fact, during a 2012 Television Critics Association panel, Eileen Heisler, one of the two female showrunners of ABC’s The Middle and a former producer for Murphy Brown, attributed TV’s lady renaissance in part to Fey. “I think Tina Fey – and us – poked a little hole that allowed for this (proliferation of women in television),” she said, according to Deadline. As we all learned during this year’s Golden Globes, it was watching Tina Fey, among others, that helped a young Lena Dunham make it through middle school. That has to count for something. 
 
 Even though more opportunities for women now exist, TV comedy, like TV in general, still remains an unquestionably male-dominated field. 
 
 Modern Family has been the Emmy-anointed Best Comedy on television for three years running, but only one of the 12 producers credited with last year’s victory is a woman. Fewer than half of the members of the writing staff of The Big Bang Theory are Pennys as opposed to Sheldons. 
 
 According to IMDB, in the 20-plus years that The Simpsons has been on the air, only seven of its 71 episode-writing credits belong to women. Even the 30 Rock writing staff skews male but, to its credit, just barely: According to NBC, five of its 12 current writers are women. 
 
 It may be too early to determine what the lasting legacy of Liz Lemon is, especially since it’s not quite clear, prefinale, how to interpret what appears to be Liz’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom to her newly adopted twins, Terry and Janet (aka Lil Tracy and Lil Jenna) – a decision that will undoubtedly start a whole new round of Lemonalysis in the blogosphere. But these words written by Fey herself in the aforementioned Bossypants sound at least partly right: 
 
 “My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’ If the answer is no, forget it and move on . . . don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go ‘Over! Under! Through!’ and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.” ||||| I fell in love at first sight with Tina Fey's "30 Rock," the NBC sitcom that Thursday night will end our seven-season relationship with a double-length series finale. We have both grown in the interim — well, "30 Rock" has — and if it is not now the same series that first won my heart, by winning my head, it is an even better one, bold and confident and more completely itself. 
 
 The show that premiered on Oct. 11, 2006, was in many respects a conventional backstage comedy. Fey's show runner Liz Lemon struggled with corporate interference in the form of Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy, "the new vice president of East Coast television and microwave programming" — GE owned NBC at the time — and an unruly new star, Tracy Morgan's Tracy Jordan, who introduced himself to her letting her know that, contrary to tabloid reports, "I'm not on crack, I'm straight-up mentally ill." 
 
 At the same time, it contained the seeds of all it would become — as a comedy series on NBC about a comedy series on NBC, it was self-referential and meta-fictional from the start, and an unpredictable line like "We're a team now, like Batman and Robin, like chicken and a chicken container" (Tracy to Liz) signaled an original ear, a different sort of approach to a joke. 
 
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 By the fifth episode, in which a product placement for Snapple was made brutally obvious and the fourth wall came down, the future was apparent: Anything was possible as long as it was done in character. From the invented swear words of Liz Lemon to the cast becoming Muppets to an episode that morphed into a "Dark Knight" movie, to a live episode and episodes framed as a reality show, "Why not?" became its guiding principle. 
 
 The humor was so unmistakably smart and self-aware that the writers could get away with the most sexist, racist or scatological remarks and still smell fresh: In its large and able cast, abetted by a league of recurring and guest players, there was a voice for every uncomfortable occasion — if each character had her or his own sort of intelligence, or survival instinct, each also had a special sort of stupidity. 
 
 Fey's original, rejected pitch had been for a show set at a cable news network to feature herself and Baldwin; she switched it back to more familiar territory and added Morgan — the "third heat," to borrow a phrase from the show — that allowed her to write about gender, race and class. Right off the bat, this distinguished the show's ambitions from those of nearly everything else on television. 
 
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 They also formed a kind of group psyche, with Liz the ego and Jack the superego, with id Tracy doubled by Jane Krakowski's needy Jenna Maroney — a doubleness made explicit in a recent episode when the two were essentially reincarnated as the twins that Liz has adopted. 
 
 Paced and scored (marvelously, by Fey's husband, Jeff Richmond) with the moment-by-moment precision of a Tex Avery cartoon, "30 Rock" specialized in a kind of sudden-turn joke in which the end of a sentence could not be guessed from its beginning. (Jenna: "She's lying like a rug — rug is an offensive term for Persians that I made up." Tracy: "I once played a lawyer in a movie, so I know all about winning your son's love back, thanks to a magic camera.") Such turns came to be expected, but were no less pleasurable for it. 
 
 Fittingly, the final episodes of "30 Rock" are about the final episodes of the show within the show. They are full of returning characters and themes, nods small and large to the early episodes, and some last bites of the hands that fed them: "This is broadcast television — it's a nasty, ruthless business," Jack told Jack McBrayer's pure-to-the-last page Kenneth in last week's episode, as he looked to hire his own replacement, a dying enterprise in need of "a grave robber who'll strip every last bauble off the corpse." 
 
 At the same time, they provide many occasions to be moved, even as they mock the manipulative ways that television tries to move you. Because, underneath the irony and the parody and the satire, the knowingness and the cleverness and the strangeness, it's clear that the series was made with commitment and exhilaration, and that love, though it takes many unusual forms, has been its most constant themes. Just so, Fey has taken steps to send off her creations with their hearts' desire. 
 
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 What is the legacy of these critically acclaimed, low-rated, award-winning seven seasons? There's the useful phrase "I want to go to there," which Fey stole from her daughter Alice. And obviously, there's the example of Fey herself, as a groundbreaking Woman in Comedy: the 2010 recipient of the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, author of a bestselling memoir, "Bossypants," and a role model for ambitious nerd girls everywhere. It's not fair to say that there'd be no Mindy Kaling or Lena Dunham without her, but their paths would have been different and surely more difficult. 
 
 Fey's show is itself too singular — and too unsuccessful, in its context — to have spawned a school of obvious followers; if anything, network comedy seems to be swinging the other way. (There are a few jokes about the resurgence of old-school sitcoms scattered through the finale.) But that it exists at all, an unlikely thing in an unlikely place, like a flower finding a crack in a sea of concrete, is in itself inspiring. 
 
 Seven seasons of "30 Rock" seem to me a triumph, and not just for Fey and her people, but for all who watched its progress with admiration and gratitude and the out-loud sort of laughter. After a good episode, I feel a little less burdened, a little more awake, a little more alive and a little more hopeful. If such things are possible, what else might we not do? 
 
 We have to part now, and though it was not my idea, I am fine with it. All good things must end — to every thing its season, or seven. It's a gift when they go while they're good. 
 
 --------------------------------- 
 
 '30 Rock' 
 
 Where: NBC 
 
 When: 8 p.m. Thursday 
 
 Rating: TV-14-DL (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language) 
 
 robert.lloyd@latimes.com
– Tina Fey's 30 Rock ends its seven-year run tonight, and the tributes are plentiful. Here's a sample: Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times: "What is the legacy of these critically acclaimed, low-rated, award-winning seven seasons?" he asks. The "show is itself too singular—and too unsuccessful, in its context—to have spawned a school of obvious followers; if anything, network comedy seems to be swinging the other way. ... But that it exists at all, an unlikely thing in an unlikely place, like a flower finding a crack in a sea of concrete, is in itself inspiring." Jen Chaney Slate, Concord Monitor: Fey's success "just so happened to occur on the front end of what has been a very encouraging time for women working in the industry. More high-profile comedies—from Girls to The Big C to Enlightened to The New Girl and The Mindy Project, which serve as anchors for Fox’s Tuesday night comedy block—are being created or co-created by women and placing dynamic, dysfunctional and funny female characters at the center of their narratives." Fey may not be directly responsible, but surely she played a role. Alessandra Stanley, New York Times: "Fey is a pioneer who resists being taken too seriously. She prefers to be revered for her irreverence. But one sign of her influence is her ability to persuade powerful, sensible women to go on 30 Rock and make fools of themselves." (It's Nancy Pelosi's turn tonight.) One quibble: Stanley thinks Fey's casting of herself as a frumpy nerd was the "weakest" part of the show. "She was never fully convincing in the role of a loser." Emma Keller, the Guardian: Fey had great fun poking holes in female stereotypes, writes Keller, who rounds up her favorite "feminist" scenes here.