Tina Fey’s sitcom “30 Rock” ends tonight, dammit. I haven’t yet seen the finale (I’ll be watching it along with you screener-deficient folks), but I’m genuinely sad to lose my Thursdays with this awesomely dense comedy, which amounted to a grenade made of zingers. Sweet yet sour, at once funny ha-ha and funny-peculiar—and also funny-relevant, if that were a thing—“30 Rock” is quotable to a nearly psychotic degree. I’ll miss it like a stalker misses her stalkee.

I could take pretty much any angle in looking back on “30 Rock,” but I’ll take the one that I am currently experiencing: looking straight at the Empire State Building. When the sitcom débuted, it was based on Fey’s experience as the first female head writer for “Saturday Night Live,” but it quickly became something bigger, stranger, and bolder: a surreal machine capable of commenting on anything, from feminism and prismatic perspectives on race to national politics, reality television, and corporate culture—always from a New Yorker’s P.O.V.

Not that the characters were native New Yorkers, mind you, other than Tracy (who was born in Yankee Stadium and attended middle school at an Exxon station in the Bronx). The rest had moved to Manhattan from somewhere else: Pennsylvania, Florida, Massachusetts, Georgia. They were ambitious nuts who lived for their jobs, injecting the office comedy mold with both workaholism and a recurrent anxiety about what that might mean. (“I wish I’d worked more,” confessed Jack on his near-deathbed. Later, during a time-travel sequence, Future Jack told Jack he needed Liz to distract him from his own ambition.) While many shows have been set in a bland facsimile of “New York,” “30 Rock” was obsessive about the actual city, referring to events large and small, including several elections, the financial crisis, and that weird maple-syrup smell that floated over Manhattan. It wasn’t sentimental, either, or unafraid to make a sick joke, like the moment a subway speaker announced, “This train is going express for nooo reason. Next stop: One Millionth Street and Central Park Jogger Memorial Highway.”

When I asked for other examples on Twitter, I got an absolute deluge of references. There was the store Brooklyn Without Limits (“w/ locations in Gay Town, White Harlem, and the Van Beardswick section of Brooklyn”); the episode about anti-terrorist paranoia (“If you suspect anything, do everything”); and Dennis Duffy as the subway hero, yelling “Baba Booey, Stern rules!” at a Bloomberg press conference. There was Jack accidentally giving a homeless-person’s speech on the subway. The time when a hobo spat in Liz’s mouth and a fabulous old lady said “I just love New York in the spring” and then got pushed into garbage. David Schwimmer played an actor whose last job was on a Rick Lazio-for-Senate commercial and Jack attempted to get Devon’s “gaybies” into St. Matthew’s, a preschool so prestigious that the saint’s descendants were rejected.

There were also bedbugs, Moonvest, a City Hall wedding, and so many dead-on quips. “He goes to Sbarro when he’s stressed, the New York Stock Exchange when he’s horny, and Christie’s when he’s depressed.” “There was a cyclone in Brooklyn last year. It destroyed two vintage T-shirt shops and a banjo.” “I will give you a New York minute, Lemon, which is seven seconds.”

Not to mention the Red Hook-Ikea episode, or the one in which Liz and Kenneth took the X train to the Zorgonia station in Queens, and the time “T.G.S.” hired former Lehman Brothers brokers as interns. Or the midtown fireworks that gave people 9/11 flashbacks. Or Little Chechnya. Or Liz becoming a Liberty cheerleader. The three Rite Aids on one street corner. Celia’s bakery in the Bronx, located on the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and Guy Who Shot Malcolm X Boulevard.

Last year’s brilliant episode “The Tuxedo Returns” was a full-on referendum on Manhattan life, tricked out as a parody of “The Dark Knight.” Jack gets mugged and runs for mayor, retreating from the population and refusing to change out of formal wear. Meanwhile, fed up with the city’s rudeness, Lemon complains, “Jay-Z was right about New York. Concrete bungholes where dreams are made up, there’s nothing you can do.” She embraces her urban rage, realizing that a gray wig lets her become the sort of deranged old woman who gets seats on the subway by confiding to strangers, “I’m pregnant with a kitty-cat. Those are my popsicles.” With her lipstick smeared, her clothes dishevelled, she devolves into the Joker, hissing, “What did the rules ever get me? The worst seat at the movies? A bunch of music I paid for? A drawer full of leaky batteries I don’t know what to do with?” Then she whips her cape and struts into the night.

Despite that vivid little breakdown, the story of Liz Lemon is one version of the New York dream—she may be an artistic sellout, but she’s wildly successful. At first, Lemon was a frazzled, underpaid “creative” working on a mediocre skit show; she became a comparatively chill, well-paid professional, still running a mediocre skit show, but capable of getting Jack Donaghy to negotiate her salary against himself, on her behalf. (Many mid-series episodes were all about Lemon’s anxieties about becoming a rich Manhattanite: at one point, she even considers becoming a wealthy Upper East Side woman of leisure, only to discover her fancy new friends are in a fight club.) In Season 2, she interviews with a co-op board, which turns into a drunk-dialling debacle. (“You know what? I’ve moved on. I bought a whole bunch of apartments. I bought a black apartment.”) But eventually, she does buy an apartment, then the apartment upstairs, building a duplex so enviable that her new female page fantasizes about wearing Liz’s lips as a mask.

There were also regular indications of a New York outside this glamorous Upper West Side existence, especially Tracy’s repressed memories of his Bronx past: “All my life I’ve tried to forget the things I’ve seen. A crackhead breast-feeding a rat, a homeless man cooking a Hot Pocket on a third rail of the G train!” (These particular traumas come flooding back up during the EGOT plot arc, when Tracy gains prestige for his appearance in the movie “Hard to Watch: Based on the Novel ‘Stone-Cold Bummer,’ by Manipulate.”)

There will be other New York shows set in New York—you may have heard about a few that are set in Brooklyn. But there won’t be another “30 Rock.” Instead, we’ll have to carry in our hearts Liz’s immortal words, words that will echo in reruns: “It doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived in New York. It’s still fun to pretend all the buildings are giant severed robot penises.”