We're madly in love with the writing on 30 Rock, mainly because each wickedly clever line is laced with loads of nerd-only humor. Sure, Big Bang Theory is cute and full of genre arguments and pop-culture showdowns, but I have much more respect for the show that can slip in a Star Trek/Boston Legal joke with out flinching. To show our appreciation, we've rounded up the best of the best 30 Rock geek moments — feel free to suggest your own.

The embrace of the genre way isn't a new thing for non-genre shows. Below I've collected a few moments from the leading contenders that also excel in dropping BSG riff after Rocky Horror joke. Please add on your favorites in the comments.

Veronica Mars
Veronica and friends really knew how to turn a phrase into a layered geek out dialogue session, here's just a taste of best.

The Big Bang Theory
The series is about nerds...so not really fair but they did really hash a lot of real life genre arguments.

The Office
Dwight represent!



How I Met Your Mother
We actually wrote an entire about this dillema, can you love someone that doesn't love Star Wars?

Additional reporting and gathering by Julia Carusillo.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Stargate: Atlantis and Heroes alumna Jaime Ray Newman (although she'll always be Veronica Mars' Mindy O'Dell to me) is joining the SciFi Channel series for at least five episodes as Dr. Tess Fontana, who's described as

a brilliant engineer and astrophysicist who sees things differently than those around her. Her scientific imagination knows no bounds putting her at odds with the mainstream scientific community.

Whether that's the mainstream scientific community or Eureka's mainstream scientific community is uncertain; after all, those guys tend to build the ridiculous and impossible on a weekly basis over there, so "mainstream" is somewhat of a movable feast.

Of course, the Eureka news we're really waiting for is when the show will come back to complete its third season...

'Eureka' nabs Newman for role [Hollywood Reporter]

While Beeman - who directed last week's second episode, and has been with the show since the beginning - doesn't point out the major flaw in last night's "One of Us, One of Them" (That would be the "Hey, Sylar's a good guy now! Look, he put on a funny accent and ordered that asshole cop around! Ain't he a card?" turnaround, which didn't just stretch what little credibility the show had as much as just gleefully shred it while giggling and telling the audience not to think too much, just look at Zachary Quinto in a suit - Seriously, people, WTF? You couldn't have at least tried to put some effort into that plotline?), he's happy to share some behind the scenes gossip about Claire's showdown with her mom and Hiro and Ando's moviegoing experiences in Germany:

The first draft of the script, from a production standpoint, was very big. It had the bank robbery more-or- less as it currently exists. It also had a Claire/Meredith scene, which currently occurs in a cargo container. This scene originally took place in a deserted warehouse where Claire was surrounded by fire. The Hiro/Ando/Daphne scene, which currently occurs in a German movie theatre, originally took place on a train traveling through India, complete with Hiro and Ando on the roof of the train and Ando nearly falling out the side of a baggage car.

Personally, I loved the first draft of this script. It was a great, incredibly exciting read. I loved the way the bank robbery was written, and the idea that Sylar was to become HRG’s new partner blew my mind. The entire component parts were great – but, collectively, it was also, obviously, too big to be affordable. Beyond that though, the choices we producer’s faced of how to get the budget down became very subjective. The bank robbery was the obvious thing that had to stay because it drove the central story and the key recurring stories for the series– For me, the scripted moment where time freezes and future Peter appears was a key event (it sent a chill down my spine when I first read it.) So the Claire story and the Hiro story were what had to be attacked.

Not that the bank robbery escaped entirely unscathed:

There were changes made to reduce budget in the bank scenes as well. Most noteably – at first Jesse’s power was Earthquake-stomp (Like Gorgon of the Inhumans from the Fantastic Four comics) But this power implied cracking floors and walls and all manner of damage that would be expensive to produce. At the last minute we changed him to a Sonic scream (like DC’s Black Canary) – this was easier to accomplish but was a bummer too us because we already had Echo from the online webisodes with sonic power – Oh well…

The biggest bummer for me was the death of the villains (Well, three of the four) so quickly - Not only does it kind of make me wonder what the point of pretending that they were a big deal in the first place was if they were going to be written out after a botched bank robbery (Also, what was the point of the "hidden Peter" plot at all?), but I'm depressed that Weevil's death robs me of any more potential Veronica Mars reunion moments. But what did the rest of you think?

Season 3, Episode 3 [Beaming Beeman]

An adaptation of a German dramedy, Mythological X centers around a woman looking through former boyfriends to find the man her psychic told her she would marry. Here's how SevenOne International describes the original series:

What does a single 30+ woman think when she is told that the love of her life is one of the exes that she dumped? She actually stops thinking and goes back to seek out the one ... the one she left behind.

6. Trek is a poison dart of nostalgia aimed at the hearts of aging fan-dudes. The franchise caters to a fearsomely loyal cadre of dorks who recite Shatner's Promise Margarine commercials to each other. They also obsess over every minor detail from the show's 40,000 year history, leading to...

5. Obsessive continuity and reveling in cheese. Rumor has it the new Trek movie will feature tribbbles and the Guardian of Forever, and god knows what other callbacks to ancient episodes. Trek also groans under the weight of cliches it can never outgrow, from "beam me up" to "warp nine" to "shields down to 59 percent."

4. It's an out-of-date news flash. Trek's format is a Cold War relic, from the original show's running Soviets=Klingons metaphor to the post-Cold War "new order" of TNG and DS9. Most storylines relate to "our" superpower, the Federation, facing off against other superpowers or coping with third-world planets. Take away the Cold War as a reference point, and you have boring space opera.

3. It's no longer looking ahead. Like Star Wars, Trek is trapped in prequel-land. Enterprise bored us by filling in pointless backstory on the early days of Starfleet, but the J.J. Abrams movie looks to be twice as pointless. We already know everything we need to about young Kirk and the other Trek tots. Mining your own past is a prime symptom of idea bankruptcy.

2. We're tired of the clueless wanker with Aspergers who teaches us what it means to be human. Spock was sort of cute, so nu-Trek served up Data, Odo, that holographic doctor, Seven of Nine and T'Pol. It's not Trek without Rain Man trying to understand our human ways. We prefer the Cylons, who school us about humanity by screwing and killing us.

1. Sanctimonious preaching is in Trek's DNA. From the Prime Directive to the Captain's Log, the franchise was made for droning voices giving us lectures. Starfleet Academy must give would-be captains a special course in holding forth about the moral lesson in every conceivable situation. We're also sick of constantly hearing about how our heroes are too noble to share their advanced technology with other cultures.

In a nutshell, the only Star Trek we've liked in ages was Galaxy Quest, and that was mostly for Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman and Veronica Mars' dad.

Maya will realize that (duh) Sylar is evil. Nikki has to rescue Monica from that street gang that stole some comic books. (It's a gang thing. They love those obscure Ditko comics for their Ayn Rand messages.) Peter and Nathan finally get reunited, but then they have to deal with that whole "Adam wants to wipe out humanity" thing. Elle has to make some tough decisions. Oh, and a couple of good guys are going to bite it. And Claire will try to blow the whistle on her dad's old company, as you can see in this clip:

Want more spoilers for the episode? These seem like they could be credible.

Tonight's episode of Chuck might also be the last one for a while. NBC still has two more Chuck eps in the can, but it's not clear when they'll air, says Reuters. "Chuck vs. the Crown Vic" doesn't sound particularly climactic: Chuck has to go undercover as Sarah's wife to deal with a "counterfeiting yachtsman with strong political ties." Seeing the downtrodden Chuck confronting evil rich people sounds sort of entertaining in a Veronica Mars-y way.

Also tonight: part two of Tin Man, the Sci-Fi channel's re-noodling of Wizard of Oz. Tin Man
concludes on Tuesday with another two-hour installment. If you don't have a TiVo or some other device that lets you tape two channels at once, don't worry. Sci-Fi will re-run Monday's segment before Tuesday's.

Monday night movies: X2: X-Men United on FX, and Being John Malkovich on IFC.

Tuesday night sees the season finale of Beauty and the Geek, in which a LARPer and a science-fiction fan compete to win the admiration of hawt girls who can tie cherry stems with their tongues. All of the show's teams return, for the maximum concentration of cringe-inducing stereotypes.

Wednesday night movie: The Brother from Another Planet on TMC. If you haven't seen it, you really should check it out. You'll barely notice that Bionic Woman is off.

Thursday's Smallville is a rerun where he meets his cute cousin.

Friday has a Flash Gordon rerun, but a new Stargate Atlantis, the last new episode until January. A "strange drone" crashes into Atlantis, and it could mean the Replicators have found Atlantis. (The Replicators are self-replicating machines, sort of like the Borg except without any human parts.) More spoilers than you can shake a stick at are here.