Meet Liz Lemon, head writer of The Girlie Show, a female-oriented sketch comedy show starring her friend Jenna Maroney. Until one day when a new network executive, Jack Donaghy, tells her to hire Tracy Jordan, an erratic male comedian, in order to draw in an unneeded male demographic.
Tropes present in this episode:
- Characterization Marches On: Liz is basically a Straight Man, with little indication that she has any eccentricities of her own. Jack is played as a Pointy-Haired Boss for the most part, and Pete of all people seems to be Liz's mentor. Jenna is more neurotic than self-centered, making her status as Liz's best friend more believable than it is in later seasons.
- Department of Redundancy Department: "This is the set of The Girlie Show, it's a real fun ladies' comedy show for ladies." — Kenneth's first line of the series.
- The Dog Bites Back: Despite being in a long line for a hot dog stand, Liz bares witness to a random passerby deciding to start a second line out of spite. As such, Liz makes a point of buying all of the hot dogs, and giving them to everyone but the second line.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The show started off much more realistic and low-key than it would later become, and this is especially the case with the pilot.
- Expospeak Gag:Toofer: Surely, our massive conglomerate parent company could spring for a samovar of coffee.
Frank: Yeah, or like a big coffee dispenser.
Toofer: That's what a samovar is.
Frank: Are there other black nerds, or is it just you and Urkel? - Expy:
- The Girlie Show is a fictional, female-oriented Saturday Night Live, of course.
- Tracy's movie Honky Grandma Be Trippin' is a parody of the Martin Lawrence film Big Momma's House.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The very first scene of the show sees Liz encountering a Jerkass at a hot dog stand who cuts ahead of a large line in order to start a second line, basically out of spite. As such, this is the first bit of dialogue for the show:Liz: (to the jerk) Woah, excuse me, there's a line, buddy.Jerk: There's two lines.
- George Jetson Job Security: Pete is fired, but gets his job back by the end of the episode.
- The Peter Principle: It's not spelled out, but there's the definite implication that Jack was a capable executive in GE's appliance division whose promotion to heading NBC has taken him well outside his wheelhouse.
- Pilot: It's (as how the name says) the Pilot episode.
- Series Continuity Error: Jack is portrayed as trying to "fix" an already established show that's performing just fine, implying that The Girlie Show has been on the air for some time. Later on, TGS and 30 Rock are always on the same number of seasons for the sake of Leaning on the Fourth Wall jokes.
- In the unaired pilot, it is said that The Girlie Show has only been airing for five weeks, lending a little more credence to this.
- Stealth Insult: Jack's penchant for backhanded compliments begins in the first episode:Jack: I like you. You have the boldness of a much younger woman.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: Early on, Jack describes Tracy as "the third heat" as part of a metaphor based on GE's Trivection oven. At the end of the episode, Tracy randomly declares that, "I am the third heat!" Alternately, the two men using the same phrase could hint that Jack did a lot more "groundwork" on Tracy than he let on to Liz.
- Unique Pilot Title Sequence: The opening credits feature Liz in a That Girl/The Mary Tyler Moore Show-type opening, but this ends up as a Left the Background Music On gag and actually they're singing about the Show Within the Show character "Pam, the Overly-Confident Morbidly Obese Woman". The "Pam" tune is heard instrumentally in later episodes, however, becoming a Leitmotif for Liz.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: Liz's joke that the "Laura Bush" dress would be appropriate for her to wear to work "if I was President of the Philippines." This is a reference to then Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who had a similar fashion sense.
