If you tuned into 30 Rock on Thursday night, you witnessed the halo effect in all its glory and hilarity.
The episode, called The Bubble, showed Liz Lemon’s (Tina Fey) boyfriend, Dr. Drew Baird (Jon Hamm), getting special treatment because he is good-looking. Through a montage of scenes, it becomes obvious that Drew is not very good at a lot of things (cooking, sex, tennis, etc.) but because he is so attractive he has been living his whole life in a “Bubble” where people don’t tell him the truth about his short-comings. In this Bubble, he gets complimented on the street, teaches a sport he cannot play, gets out of a parking ticket, and thinks orange Gatorade tastes good on salmon.
Jack (Alec Baldwin) has to explain to Liz what the Bubble is: a place where good-looking people live and no one tells them the truth — “a danger of being super-handsome”. He shares with her a photo of him at 25, with a Superman chest and piercing blue eyes, when he himself lived in the Bubble. He says, “I’ve got to get back in the bubble.”
Liz eventually feels compelled to tell Drew that he lives differently than most people because of his attractiveness. Drew doesn’t like reality outside and wants to stay in the Bubble and have Liz there with him. She says she can’t and tells him the relationship won’t work out. He drives off (barely) on his new motorcycle.
Two beauty phenomena occur in this episode. The first is obvious — the halo effect — which I introduced you to last week in Beauty 101. The second, the generalized halo effect, I explain in the second installment of Beauty 101.
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