John Francis "Jack" Donaghy ( ) is a fictional character on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, airing from 2006 to 2013. The character was created by series creator Tina Fey, and is portrayed by Alec Baldwin. He was introduced as the Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for General Electric. As Vice President, he serves as the protagonist Liz Lemon's (Fey) boss as well as her personal mentor. As the series progresses, their relationship develops and informs their respective storylines. Donaghy climbs up the corporate hierarchy to achieve his professional dream of leading General Electric as its president and chairman.
Donaghy's penchant for wealth, power, authority, conservative values, and social status has been acclaimed as a high point of the series and his characterization. Fey intended for the character to serve as an oppositional but complementary counter to Lemon, expressed through various gender, social, and power dynamics. Baldwin received two Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, seven Screen Actors Guild Awards, and one Television Critics Association Award for his portrayal of this character.
Storylines and characteristics John Francis Donaghy had an unhappy and impoverished childhood in South Boston and in the fictional suburb of Sadchester, Massachusetts. When he was two, Jack's presumed father lured him to the edge of a swimming pool with a puppy and pushed him in the pool, and later abandoned his family. His mother Colleen Murphy Donaghy has nagged him his whole life, even blaming him for John F. Kennedy's death and for his father leaving. However, she was also devoted to her children. For example, it was noted that she had traded sexual favors with (the fictional) Frederick August Otto Schwarz III for Christmas presents for Jack and his siblings. Young Jack took to calling his collie "Pop" until the dog was accidentally run over by the mailman and intentionally left to die in the street by his mother. The dog had earlier been neutered, causing Jack to charge his mother with "cutting Pop's balls off." His mother even tried to send him to Vietnam when he was 12 to make a man out of him. He also played hockey, the piano and the flute as a child, prompting his mother to embarrass him by having him play "The Star-Spangled Banner" on said flute in front of the hockey team, which he also captained.
Due to his family's poverty, Donaghy began working at the age of 12, as a stevedore at the Port of Boston. He attended Princeton University on a handsomeness scholarship, where he played football and baseball for the Tigers, joined the Princeton Charter Club, played Maria in an all-male production of West Side Story, was a member of the "Twig and Plums" secret society, and was a classmate of Michelle Obama. In addition to the Amory Blaine Handsomeness Scholarship, his jobs during college included "the day shift at a graveyard, and the graveyard shift for the Days Inn"; working as a janitor at a primate laboratory; and a job for the linguistics department recording every word in the English language, to preserve the perfect American accent in case of nuclear war. He laments that his voice has been dragged into various things like Thomas the Tank Engine and Wu-Tang Clan songs. (This joke refers to Alec Baldwin's role as a storyteller for Thomas and Friends in the U.S., seasons 5 and 6. He was also cast in the role of Mr. Conductor in Thomas and the Magic Railroad in 2000.) Subsequently, the linguistics department sold his voice to GE for use in their microwaves. He later attended Harvard Business School, which he paid for by working as a Swan Boat operator, and where he was voted "Most" by his classmates.
Post-college, Jack worked as an intern for Senator Ted Kennedy, where Jack displayed an extremely liberal political world-view, even by the standards of a young Al Gore. At some point, though as yet unexplained, he underwent a complete reversal of his philosophy and became a conservative Republican. Jack participated in Hands Across America and at some point personally coined the phrase "what's the upside?" He confessed that Carly Simon's 1972 hit song "You're So Vain" was, in fact, written by him.
In the years after working for Kennedy, Jack "thrived" on fear, bow hunting polar bears, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, once driving a rental car into the Hudson River to practice escaping, showering with Greta Van Susteren and overcoming a peanut allergy through sheer willpower. Jack once practiced martial arts under Chuck Norris, but they had a falling out after he switched to another dojo.
It is revealed in "Live from Studio 6H" that, as a young employee in the GE poisons division in 1986, Jack answered phones during a live telethon. During that broadcast, Tracy Jordan realized his talent for getting laughs as a performer. A 16-year-old Liz Lemon made a prank call, claiming to have been a nurse in the war who was impregnated by General Electric when he was Colonel Electric. Jack's loyalty to GE and his handsomeness impressed Don Geiss, who transferred Jack to the microwave ovens division. At some point, he also rotated through GE's plastics division, where he befriended the "brilliant plastics engineer/lesbian", Gretchen Thomas. After years of market research, he finally made his "greatest triumph" in the form of the Trivection oven, a product he created at General Electric, having first envisioned it while responding to Liz Lemon's prank call in 1986. It was on the strengths of the Trivection oven that, in mid-2006, he replaced recently deceased Gary to become Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming.
Jack was the architect of bringing Tracy Jordan on board the NBC sketch show The Girlie Show, despite the objections of head writer/creator Liz Lemon and producer Pete Hornberger. Jack made sure that Tracy was the main star and ensured the show's name was changed to TGS with Tracy Jordan after bribing a focus group with pizza. Other shows that NBC purchases while he is an executive include MILF Island and Queen of Jordan.
Jack's mother still constantly calls him and she wants to move in with him, away from her retirement home in Jupiter, Florida, which has rocks made of foam because she tends to fall down a lot. However, at the end of the episode, he blackmails Josh Girard into taking all his mother's calls for him for the rest of Josh's life (Jack says that his mother will outlive Josh - "she's like Castro"), since Josh has a flawless "Jack Donaghy" impersonation. In the wake of the episode "Fireworks," Jack is demoted to Vice President of East Coast Television when CEO Don Geiss takes his microwave oven programming duties away from him, although a comment to Liz suggests that it may have been given back to him. At some point, he wrote a book entitled Jack Attack: The Art of Aggression in Business.
Acting on Don Geiss' advice, Jack gets engaged to Christie's auctioneer Phoebe. However, Liz later discovers that Phoebe is actually an unscrupulous gold digger who is pretending to be English. Jack refuses to believe this since Phoebe had told him that Liz is infatuated with him and he decides to continue with their wedding. The situation is resolved when Jack has a heart attack while in bed with Phoebe, and realizes while recovering in the hospital during a conversation with Liz, Phoebe and his mother that he is in fact not in love with Phoebe. During this conversation, Jack's mother uses his heart monitor as a lie detector. Jack recovers from his heart attack and becomes a candidate to succeed Don Geiss as CEO of GE, competing against his arch-rival, Vice-President of West Coast Television Devon Banks, who, despite being openly gay, has gotten engaged to Geiss' oblivious daughter Kathy. Jack momentarily wins the coveted job of Geiss' replacement, only to lose it when Geiss slips into a diabetic coma. Banks makes a power grab, convincing the board of directors that the CEO's seat should stay with the family and getting his fiancée Kathy appointed, with Banks as the power behind the throne. Jack is demoted and humiliated, and leaves GE for a position in George W. Bush's administration. This proves to be hopeless, and Jack attempts to get himself fired. He succeeds this by funding a "gay bomb," a weapon that would cause enemy soldiers to "go totally gaybones for each other." The chemical weapon is accidentally released in a secret war bunker, and it is implied that Jack has sex with Dick Cheney. This implication is furthered when Jack later confesses his sins to an ill-prepared priest.
Jack starts out again at GE — in the mailroom. He works his way up to the top again in amazingly rapid fashion, however. Jack contemplates having sex with Kathy Geiss to save the company from Banks' plan to shut GE down completely for two years, but is able to avoid this with Liz's help. In the end, Kathy signs a contract making Jack her main business advisor, and Banks takes off. Don Geiss emerges from his coma shortly thereafter, but stuns Jack with the news that he has decided to stay on as GE's chairman after all. Jack remains in his position as head of NBC, telling Liz Lemon how many times an episode she can use the phrase "cat anus". Jack discovers that Jimmy Donaghy is not his real father. Similar to the plot of Mamma Mia, Jack finds that he has three possible fathers. Liz invites them to TGS saying they won a contest, and Jack quickly finds that his father is Milton Greene, a Bennington College professor. Getting in an argument with Milton about politics, he says to Liz that he does not want to tell Milton, but Liz convinces him otherwise. After Jack tells Milton that he is Milton's son, Milton tells Jack he needs a kidney or he will die. Jack finds that he is not a match and organizes a "We Are the World"-type charity called "Kidney Now," with celebrities singing a song that asks anyone who is a match to give Milton a kidney. One of the celebrities, Elvis Costello, ultimately proves to be a match and saves Milton's life himself.
Devon Banks comes back at Jack with a revenge plan involving the United States government trying to shut down GE. Jack is able to get out of it, however. Jack is described by his assistant Jonathan as being the "best gift giver in the world." One year, Jonathan bought Jack a $95 bottle of olive oil for Christmas and in return Jack had Jonathan's sister released from a North Korean jail. When Liz and Jack finally agree to exchange gifts, they agree on spending zero dollars for each other (with both trying to one-up the other). Jack has Jonathan drive all over Pennsylvania to find a program of Liz's production of The Crucible, framed in wood from her stage and not reimbursing Jonathan for gas. Liz calls in a bomb threat at Penn Station (getting Frank, Toofer, and Lutz arrested in the process) to keep Jack's high school crush, Nancy, in town. Finally, Jack brings in Liz's childhood crush, Larry Wilcox (in-costume as Jon Baker), as a date for her.
Donaghy's goal is to lead "the General" and become CEO of General Electric, like his mentors Geiss and Jack Welch. This appears to become impossible in 2010 when he learns from his girlfriend Avery that Philadelphia-based cable company Kabletown has bought NBC from GE. At first, Jack doubts the story because he hasn't heard anything, but then he finds out from Welch that the sale is happening and that Geiss is dead. Jack connects with an old colleague from GE who left to join Kabletown, and discovers that NBC's new owners don't make anything, they get over 90% of their revenue from men ordering porn on demand. This worries Jack, until he has an idea for Kabletown to create "porn for women," essentially women paying to have men on their TV screens listen to them talk and nod approvingly.