jan hooks

Jane Krakowski spilled details on the new season of '30 Rock' on 'The Nate Berkus Show' (weekdays, syndicated), including a range of notable stars who will make guest appearances.

(S04E20) "Very different indeed. Like a cantaloupe and a Ziploc bag of mushroom soup." - Jack, on Verna's breasts

Jenna's mother Verna is one of the most vile characters on television. With her trailer-park attitude , greedy ways, sleazy demeanor and breasts that don't match each other, she's a hard character to take. Which I guess is a compliment to Jan Hooks. So congrats, Jan Hooks, you're doing a great job!

(S04E12) "It was perfect. Like a John Mayer song." - Jenna, on meeting with her mom

There's a 1984 episode of 'Kate & Allie' titled 'New Year's Eve' where Kate and Allie make a bet: Kate has to give up smoking and Allie has to give up eating chocolate (never mind that we never even saw Kate smoke before, but that's another story). Sound familiar? OK, so Liz had to stay away from all junk food and not just chocolate, but still, that was one of the plots of tonight's '30 Rock.' It's an old staple with sitcoms, of course, I just didn't think that '30 Rock' would necessarily go there.

I also don't want to see yet another character have to stay at Liz's apartment. Pete has stayed there, Tracy, and now Frank. Who's next, Jack? Kenneth? Luckily, even a couple of creaky plots can't completely hurt an episode of this show because there are so many great jokes flying at you from all directions.

This week we finally meet Jenna Maloney's mother, Verna, on '30 Rock.' Not that we've heard too much about her, I don't think, but it will be interesting to see where she came from (I'd also like to meet the sister who peed in Jenna's eye).

She's not in this clip below, but Verna is played by ex-'SNL' star Jan Hooks.

As AOL Television continues their look at the 50 Best TV Comedies -- Ever with numbers 20-11, we here at TV Squad are also looking at television comedy, but with a slightly skewed difference. Last week, we took a look at the Saturday Night Live cast members from 1975-1985 that made it to the big time. This week, we focus on the SNL casts from 1986 to 2006.

Aside from the first season of Lorne Michaels' return to the show he created and the 1994-95 season, this period was a very successful one for SNL, introducing a slew of characters and sketches that fans of the show still talk about today. It also produced a good number of Not Ready for Prime-Time Players who went on to bigger things in television and the movies (and some theater as well). Sometimes those bigger things were movies or television shows based on characters developed on SNL.

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