Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: December 6, 2012

PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: 30 Rock, “My Whole Life Is Thunder” (season 7, episode 8). [Stream on Netflix.]

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The final season of 30 Rock was somewhat all over the place, but they really managed to sell the big emotional moments and lasts that a final season entails. Just prior to “My Whole Life Is Thunder,” Liz Lemon got married to Cris (James Marsden), upsetting Jenna’s plans for her own surprise wedding; the A-plot (from which the episode title comes) is all about Jenna’s secret plan to upstage Liz at her women’s award luncheon.

With so few episodes to go before the finale, the show was racing against the clock to fit in as much plot and as many celebrity cameos as they could manage. This one in particular nabs Gayle King, Wendy Williams, and the recently deceased Florence Henderson. But it’s the episode’s B-plot where 30 Rock really came through with the kind of unexpected sincerity that occasionally snuck through. When Elaine Stritch showed up to play Jack Donaghy’s mother, not only was the audience aware that this would be Colleen’s last appearance on the show, but they could see that Stritch herself was probably not long for this world (Stritch would die a year and a half later). While still incredibly funny (Colleen episodes were always reliably hilarious), the storyline, ending with Colleen’s quiet death in a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, was a sweet send-off for a character we loved and an actress who gave 30 Rock some of the best work of her final years.

I can think of no finer tribute to Stritch than handing her the line, “I’m going out of this world exactly the way I came into it: wearing a hat.” She finally got to answer the question of whether anyone still wears a hat.

Jack Donaghy’s flawless eulogy for his mother — an epic, barely-glimpsed address full of pathos, humor, tears, and Kermit the Frog — is merely the largesse that Stritch deserved from this show that she served so well.

[You can stream 30 Rock‘s “My Whole Life Is Thunder” on Netflix.]