Donaghy's penchant for wealth, power, authority, conservative values, and social status has been acclaimed as a high point of the series and his characterization.

[2][3] Fey intended for the character to serve as an oppositional but complementary counter to Lemon, expressed through various gender, social, and power dynamics.

His mother Colleen Murphy Donaghy has nagged him his whole life, even blaming him for John F. Kennedy's death and for his father leaving.

For example, it was noted that she had traded sexual favors with (the fictional) Frederick August Otto Schwarz III for Christmas presents for Jack and his siblings.

Young Jack took to calling his collie "Pop" until the dog was accidentally run over by the mailman and intentionally left to die in the street by his mother.

In addition to the Amory Blaine Handsomeness Scholarship, his jobs during college included "the day shift at a graveyard, and the graveyard shift for the Days Inn"; working as a janitor at a primate laboratory; and a job for the linguistics department recording every word in the English language, to preserve the perfect American accent in case of nuclear war.

In the years after working for Kennedy, Jack "thrived" on fear, bow hunting polar bears, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, once driving a rental car into the Hudson River to practice escaping, showering with Greta Van Susteren and overcoming a peanut allergy through sheer willpower.

After years of market research, he finally made his "greatest triumph" in the form of the Trivection oven, a product he created at General Electric, having first envisioned it while responding to Liz Lemon's prank call in 1986.

Jack's mother still constantly calls him and she wants to move in with him, away from her retirement home in Jupiter, Florida, which has rocks made of foam because she tends to fall down a lot.

In the wake of the episode "Fireworks," Jack is demoted to Vice President of East Coast Television when CEO Don Geiss takes his microwave oven programming duties away from him, although a comment to Liz suggests that it may have been given back to him.

Jack contemplates sleeping with Kathy Geiss to save the company from Banks' plan to shut GE down completely for two years, but is able to avoid this with Liz's help.

Jack remains in his position as head of NBC, telling Liz Lemon how many times an episode she can use the phrase "cat anus".

Liz invites them to TGS saying they won a contest, and Jack quickly finds that his father is Milton Greene, a Bennington College professor.

Liz calls in a bomb threat at Penn Station (getting Frank, Toofer, and Lutz arrested in the process) to keep Jack's high school crush, Nancy, in town.

Jack connects with an old colleague from GE who left to join Kabletown, and discovers that NBC's new owners don't make anything, they get over 90% of their revenue from men ordering porn on demand.

He misses his days developing products and visiting factory floors during his tenures in GE's poisons, plastics, and microwave ovens divisions.

He is able to recover some of the investment by selling the otherwise unmarketable to the CIA as torture devices; doing so serendipitously benefits Jack when one of the couches causes an interrogated North Korean to reveal information vital to Avery's rescue.

Through triple-dealing and misdirection that put Machiavelli to shame, Jack manages to finally dispatch his precocious young nemesis, Kaylie Hooper on her grandfather's ("Poppop"'s) birthday and secure the appointment to Kabletown's chairmanship from the retiring Hank.

Despite his substantially increased power, wealth, and the hatred from liberals, Jack finds himself even less content than he was prior to the Kouchtown fiasco.

After a quick series of innovations at the start of his chairmanship (appointing NBC's ultimately longest-serving president, effectively eliminating Kabletown's worthless Indian customer service call centre to provide the same service at zero cost, and introducing GE's Six Sigma process in place of Kabletown's kitten in spaghetti), Jack abruptly resigns and sets off to sail the world alone in search of happiness.

His trip succeeds within a matter of seconds; having barely left the riverbank, he conceives of his greatest innovation: transparent dishwashers that allow the consumer to observe the cleaning action.

When he takes over as NBC's Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Programming, he orders the late Gary's former office to be immediately remodelled.

For a week-long junket to Boston to visit Nancy, Jack uses an "office replication service" to recreate the interior design for his temporary workspace at the local affiliate's studios and is surprised that Liz has not done likewise.

When he executive produces Kidnapped by Danger: The Avery Jessup Story, brought to you with limited commercial interruptions by Pride Bladder Control Pants.

Months later, as chairman of General Electric, he likewise remodels Kathy Geiss' former suite into yet another duplicate, with the GE logo behind the same assistant's desk in the anteroom.

Long before the events of the series, Jack had married an Italian woman named Bianca (Isabella Rossellini), with whom he made love on the floor of the Concorde shortly after their wedding, though he claims his mother deliberately had a heart attack to prevent him from going on his honeymoon.

The officiant whom Jack and Avery had hired for their wedding did not speak English and in due course honestly mistook Liz for the bride because she answered his request for a vow of commitment "oui" while wearing a white tennis dress and a white mosquito net (her clothes having been lost in an luggage mishap) and standing next to Jack at the altar (as best man after Bob Ballard failed to make it).

[6] Despite being brilliant and slick, Jack is portrayed as a scrupulous network executive with an affinity for overtly backhanded compliments which are usually directed towards TGS head writer Liz Lemon (whom he almost always refers to by her surname).

Jack speaks disparagingly of most demographics; his mockery of Northern liberals and Southern conservatives in the same sentence in "Season 4" prompts Liz to remark, "Wow, you just don't like anyone, do you?"

Jack also appears to be an opportunistic substance abuser, given that, in various episodes, he drinks Kenneth's cough syrup in lieu of alcohol, sniffs paint (and Jenna's breath) to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms, scoffs at the notion of sober air travel, takes mysterious purple pills offered to him by Dr. Spaceman, and is shown on the cover of a 1985 GE Quarterly Newsletter claiming that a wheelbarrow full of cocaine was just out of view.