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Entertainment July 22, 2017
"Live every day as if it's Leap Day."
“Leap Day William, Leap Day William bursting from the sea, will he bring his bucket of sweets for mom and pop and me?”
If you sang along to this song, then you’ve probably watched the “30 Rock” Leap Day episode. It was also the eighth episode of the sixth season of the show.
“30 Rock” is known to put a strange twist on holidays. Let us not forget Ludachristmas and New Queers Eve. So, naturally, “30 Rock’s” Leap Day episode would include a Santa Clause-like figure named Leap Day William who lives in the Mariana Trench and trades kids tears for candy.
The entire episode was filled with strange occurrences and twists.
In this episode, Kenneth dresses up as Leap Day William. Then, Jack eats poisonous rhubarb leaves. This puts him in a dream sequence where Kenneth, dressed as a Leap Day spirit, enters Jack’s dream to take him to Leap Day‘s past, present and future.
After his dream sequence, he realizes he needs to spend more time with his daughter, Liddy. Jenna takes Liz Lemon to a Leap Day party, thrown by her old theater friend named “Sad Thad, the skin tag lad.” Thad ends up being extremely wealthy and offers to pay Liz $20 million to take his virginity. And then Tracy finds a $50,000 Benihana gift card that expires that day and takes the TGS staff to Benihana. After, he runs into a man who is meant to be the real Leap Day William. This inspires Tracy to take an entire soup kitchen to Benihana.
Like every other “30 Rock” episode, this episode is pretty wild.
We were taught:
“30 Rock” showrunner Robert Carlock talked to Vulture about the writing process of the episode. He talked about how it was one of his favorite episodes to be involved in. And although he didn’t write the original draft, he was there when the idea came about.
“It came at a difficult point in the year when we were kind of behind, and the room had just been talking about this silly thing: ‘What if we made a big deal out of Leap Day?’ At ’30 Rock,’ it’s a pretty elastic universe,” Carlock said.
He continued to talk about how they thought the idea was too crazy until they sold the idea to Tina Fey and she agreed to approve it.
“We were always creating a universe that was a little sideways, a little parallel to the one we experience every day,” Carlock said. “I remember this being one of the easiest episodes to break ever, because we realized it was a whole buffet of stuff the audience already knows.”
The entire show fell on two Leap Days, but this was the only Leap Day episode. Carlock explained the difficulty of trying to explain in the episode why Leap Day was so important and how Liz Lemon didn’t know about it, despite seeing her on the last Leap Day.
He ends the interview by stating how amazed he was that the episode was even approved.
“It was one of those episodes full of moments where I was like … ‘I can’t believe they’re letting us do this. Someone’s paying for this to happen,'” Carlock said.
Carlock explains to Atlas Obscura that the writers felt the need to add a mythological creature to add to the mystery of the episode.
“We had been talking about leap day and this whole mythology arrived, which we loved instantly. Like Woollie, a whole other world opens up to you,” Carlock said. “You have all the short hand, the millennia of traditions. With so many holidays, it was as if we had a completely [uncovered a] new Christmas.”
So although this episode was strange and made absolutely no sense, we can’t forget what it taught us. We are to “live every day as if it’s Leap Day, and every Leap Day as if it’s your last.”
