Ellen Gray: '30 Rock' bares real side of network TV

30 ROCK. 8:30 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 10.

THERE ARE days when I think that "30 Rock" might be NBC's only true "reality" show.

Because while I don't think anyone out there still believes Donald Trump needs a new apprentice or that "The Biggest Loser" is about anything but watching other people suffer for our entertainment, I do buy into just about everything I see on "30 Rock," where NBC's entertainment division is run by, well, a crazy person.

That crazy person - they call him Jack Donaghy, a name that probably doesn't rhyme with that of any of the actual crazy people currently in charge of America's broadcast networks - is played by Alec Baldwin with the kind of unswerving belief in his character's delusions that makes you happy there's a screen between you and him.

As "30 Rock" returns tomorrow night with an episode that's bound to have the Parents Television Council rethinking its stance on NBC's so-called "family hour," Jack, and just about every fictional NBC employee at 30 Rockefeller Center, is caught up in the finale of a Peacock "reality" show called "MILF Island."

No, they're not spelling it out - and neither am I - but all you really need know is that the jurors are eighth-grade boys, the contestants bikini-clad mothers.

From the glimpses we see, some of them pixilated, "MILF Island" looks like CBS' "Survivor" but behaves like Fox's "Temptation Island."

And if you think that NBC would never be quite this desperate in what passes these days for real life, you may have forgotten that only last summer it had fortysomething "cougars" competing with twentysomething "kittens" for the affection of a 31-year-old Aussie tennis player in something called "Age of Love."

Chances are, you have forgotten - "Age of Love" averaged 5.7 million viewers - but the network, I promise you, hasn't lost sight of the fact that while Fox has "American Idol," ABC "Dancing With the Stars" and CBS "Survivor" (bloody but unbowed after, what, 57 seasons?), NBC still has only the vague hope that the Donald will someday find himself an apprentice who can ride a unicycle on "Celebrity Circus."

If "MILF Island" isn't also in development at NBC, or somewhere else, it's probably because Tina Fey - or one of "30 Rock's" other writers - thought of it first.

And decided, bless their hearts, to strangle it in its crib.

That's what they do in the bizarro world of "30 Rock," where making fun of advertisers through outrageously obvious product placement is one of the things they get paid for. So is making fun of NBC's own anointed, Conan O'Brien - even guest star Tim Conway takes a shot in next week's episode - as well as of the company itself.

It would be pretty to think that this is proof that NBC is the cool network, the one with a sense of humor about itself, and that its continued embrace of Fey's subversive little sitcom shows that it does, too, care about something beyond auctioning off every minute of its broadcast day to the highest bidders.

After all, how schlocky could a network with "30 Rock" and "The Office" and "Friday Night Lights" be?

Thank goodness, then, for the silliness that remains from those throwbacks, "American Gladiators" and "Knight Rider," to, yes, "Celebrity Apprentice."

Because without the schlock, and the whiff of desperation that accompanies it, "Rock's" snark would be wasted, the show a mere parody rather than the simple (and often hilarious) truth about television. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.