All Tina Fey, all the time (except on NBC Thursdays)

Honestly, NBC needs to take that bullet magnet out of its shoes so they quit shooting themselves in the foot. Right now, with Tina Fey, they have the hottest star on TV - she won those three Emmys last month for "30 Rock" and her Sarah Palin impersonation is the season's biggest success story (even if she'd rather live on the moon than capitalize on it past November - see entry below).

So, you know, strike while the iron's hot and all that? At NBC, not so much.

Despite Feymania, NBC declined to push up its premiere date for Season Three of "30 Rock," which was and is and will always be Oct. 30. Right now, special primetime Thursday editions of "SNL" are camping out in "30 Rock's" timeslot (9:30 p.m.) and, in fact, the first lured almost twice as many viewers as "30 Rock" manages, even without Fey's participation.

But one wonders - if NBC really wants to cajole viewers into making "30 Rock" a hit, why wouldn't they be bringing it back in a slightly more urgent fashion? A nation hungry for its Tina Fey would've tuned in and maybe even discovered just how funny her full-time day job really is, but already, any heat off its Emmy wins has dissipated, and the show will be back just in time for Fey to have hung up her Palin eyewear for good.

Ben Silverman, one of the two best co-chairmen of NBC Entertainment the network has these days, told the New York Times, "If we knew then what we know today about how hot Tina was going to be, would we do it differently? Maybe."

Maybe? Why not just say, "Would we do it differently? Nah, because here at NBC we can't think on our feet sufficiently to react to an occasional splash of good fortune and besides, we don't care about stuff like getting people to watch our best show."

Obviously, NBC was in a bit of a jam, because it's tough if not suicidal to tinker with a launch of a new show ("Kath & Kim," at 8:30 p.m.) with which you terrorized viewers with ubiquitously unfunny promos during the Olympics. But there are a couple of ways they could've at least tried:

1) Jettison "My Name is Earl" (which, I think we'll agree, is close to over) at 8 p.m. for a couple of weeks and put the "SNL" specials there - this way, they get a stronger lead-in with which to introduce "Kath & Kim" and can heavily cross-promote "30 Rock" in between debate sketches and Weekend Update one-liners.

2) Push "SNL" to 10 p.m., after "30 Rock" (Since "ER's" final season is truncated anyway, it's not going to be hurt too much by a small delay) and pad the episodes out to an hour with classic old political clips or musical guests or, well, anything.

Or, you can do nothing and hope for the best, which seems to be NBC's plan in general.