by Joy Press
The strangest thing about the Hitchens salvo was its timing, published as women were establishing an unprecedented prominence in television comedy. Tina Fey had overseen an SNL renaissance, fizzing with funny ladies such as Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig. Fey’s own series, 30 Rock, which premiered just a few months before this issue of Vanity Fair hit the newsstands, was itself a counterargument to Hitchens’s condescension.
NBC’s 30 Rock took The Mary Tyler Moore Show as its rough template: the life of an unmarried female TV producer and the behind-the-scenes hijinks of her mostly male colleagues. But where Mary Richards personified the sweet, network-friendly version of 1970s female liberation, Liz Lemon (as played by Fey) was an ambivalent metaheroine for a postfeminist era. In place of Mary’s famous spunk was Liz’s cranky skepticism. “New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single and pretending to be happy about it, overscheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover, and every two years you take up knitting . . . for a week.” That’s how Liz’s new boss, network executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) sizes her up the first time they meet, slotting her into a microdemographic with cruel accuracy.
How do you solve a conundrum like Liz Lemon? Is she the brilliant producer of a network TV show or a corporate flunky in thrall to her paternalistic boss? A paragon of womanpower or one of the guys? A frumpy, bespectacled loser who hoards cheese, or a woman who wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of a magazine? Fey and her writers set about systematically dismantling the sitcom stereotype of the single woman. In the process, 30 Rock opened a door that New Girl and The Mindy Project would soon walk through.
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A virginal straight-A student, Tina Fey amused herself as a teenager by coming up with sick insults about the popular kids and the rule breakers. At the University of Virginia, she turned her wordplay toward theater. She wrote, directed, and acted in plays, such as her senior-year one-act drama Sunday Girls, which reunited a group of female friends at the wedding of their mutual ex-boyfriend. After graduating in 1992, Fey drove her father’s old Pontiac to Chicago. By day, she worked at the Evanston YMCA; that left nights free to study improv at the Second City, the spawning ground for many of her comedy idols. There she met her future husband, Jeff Richmond, as well as future partner-in-crime Amy Poehler. Fey and Poehler became part of one of Second City’s touring companies.
Fey dreamed of “a gender-blind meritocracy” within comedy, but she found no such thing at Second City: their touring companies each had a token number of women. Things were no better at SNL in 1997, when she was hired as a staff writer. Just three out of twenty-two writers at the time were women, and there were three female cast members out of eleven. Over the next few years, a growing posse of female performers (Molly Shannon, Ana Gasteyer, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig) rose up through the ranks, in part thanks to the attention of Fey and writers such as Paula Pell. They wrote sketches such as “Old French Whore!” a game show that matched syphilitic prostitutes with American high school boys, and “Talkin’ ’Bout ’Ginas,” a Vagina Monologues rip-off performed by Anna Nicole Smith, Gayle King, and Joan Rivers. (“The last time I went near my vagina, bats flew out! Can we tawk?”) There were parodies of maxi pad commercials and the daytime TV show The View. Fey saw it as part of her mission to write stellar material for female members of the cast—a covert affirmative-action campaign.
J. J. Philbin, a twenty-one-year-old writer’s assistant when Fey came on board, describes SNL as “a tough place” for women. “When Tina got there, she demanded respect in a way that was really admirable. She wasn’t scared to do things that seemed like lady comedy, like The View, but she did it with such edge and such wit that guys couldn’t help but respect it. Eventually, Lorne [Michaels] knew that he had someone very special on his hands and put her in a position of power.”
In 1999, Michaels promoted Fey to head writer; she was the first woman to hold the job in SNL’s twenty-five-year history. With Fey at the helm, the show quickly veered back into the Zeitgeist. A year later, after seeing her perform an audacious two-woman live show with Dratch, Michaels suggested Fey audition for SNL’s most enviable job: coanchor of “Weekend Update,” alongside Jimmy Fallon. In an instant, at age thirty, Tina Fey became a recognizable face, with her librarian glasses and deadpan manner. But it was in 2004, while coanchoring “Weekend Update” with her old improv pal Poehler, that she really came into her own. The affection between them shimmered, and it gave the duo a comfort zone to play in—not just on SNL but later, as cohosts of the Golden Globes and in movies such as Baby Mama and Sisters. Having a soul mate in the tank with her made Fey more fearless.
After eight years at SNL, Fey pitched NBC’s Kevin Reilly a sitcom about a female cable news producer. Reilly urged her to base it on her own SNL experience, and by 2005 she had drafted a pilot for 30 Rock focusing on the triangle of Liz Lemon, conservative CEO Jack Donaghy, and ornery superstar Tracy Jordan. Alec Baldwin and SNL star Tracy Morgan signed on for those last two roles; Dratch was cast as Jenna, the star of 30 Rock’s SNL-like sketch-show-within-a-show, The Girlie Show. One final question lingered: Who should play Liz Lemon?
Pregnant with her first child, Fey wasn’t sure she could carry a starring role. Poehler egged her on: Did male comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld or Ray Romano worry they weren’t good enough to star in a network show? When it was framed that way, Fey knew she had to play Liz. After all, the show would be a funhouse mirror version of her own experiences within comedy’s boys’ club. Fey once compared an SNL scene to the way Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook, Deceptively Delicious, hid spinach in children’s brownies: “You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn’t even realize it because of all the jokes.” With 30 Rock, she would hide a complicated feminist heroine in a puff pastry of zany absurdism.
Fey had learned from Lorne Michaels that SNL benefited from a Spock-and-Kirk combo: the writers’ room intermingled Harvard Lampoon–style brainiacs who knew how to build a well-structured sketch and tap into contemporary politics with Second City–ish improv experts, who thrived on comedic instinct and could feed on one another’s uninhibited wackiness. From the Harvard camp, she hired Robert Carlock, who would become Fey’s co-showrunner and consigliere. A former Lampoon editor and an SNL alum, Carlock had worked on Friends and Joey. Joining him in the writers’ room were TV comedy veterans such as Frasier scribe Jack Burditt, as well as Matt Hubbard, Dave Finkel, and Brett Baer, who had all worked on Joey. There were also more inexperienced writers, such as improv performers Kay Cannon and Donald Glover, the latter such a recent college graduate that he was still living in an NYU dorm during his early days on 30 Rock.
“I remember Tina sitting at the head of the table, and Donald and I were at the other end of the table, both super wide-eyed, like, What are we doing here?” says Cannon. Both would ultimately vault to independent successes rooted in their off-kilter sensibilities. Cannon wrote the Pitch Perfect movies and Netflix series Girlboss after a stint on New Girl; Glover jumped from Community to creating and starring in the unorthodox dramedy Atlanta. Since the heart of 30 Rock was a sketch show, Cannon and Glover were able to inject their playful, improvising energy into the scripting process. Cannon suggests, “We were kind of the appointed goofballs of the group.”
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Starting in the early nineties, NBC advertised its Thursday-night comedy lineup with the slogan “Must-See TV.” Seinfeld, Will & Grace, Frasier, and Friends—these shows were such ratings monsters that other networks barely bothered to compete on Thursdays. But by 2006, NBC’s comedy slate was in tatters. Will & Grace and Friends were done, and Friends spin-off Joey had flopped. The network’s only “Must-See” hopes were the quirky blue-collar sitcom My Name Is Earl; an American adaptation of the British mockumentary The Office; and 30 Rock.
While 30 Rock was coalescing, though, NBC had also signed up another series about a live SNL-style show. Studio 60 on th
e Sunset Strip wasn’t exactly the same as 30 Rock: this one was a drama about backstage machinations and interpersonal frictions. But it was too close for comfort, especially considering the powerful people behind it. Creator Aaron Sorkin had recently triumphed with The West Wing, while the lead actors included Friends star Matthew Perry and West Wing’s Bradley Whitford. NBC insisted that these very different shows could coexist. Fey, far from convinced, complained to the New Yorker, with barely concealed bitterness, about the “bad luck” of having to go “up against the most powerful writer on television” in her first run at prime time. Further disappointment followed when Fey’s friend Rachel Dratch was dropped from 30 Rock. In her place, the more glamorous Jane Krakowski was cast, changing Jenna’s character from a dowdy loon to a hilariously vain showbiz has-been.
Studio 60 premiered in September 2006, with 30 Rock following a month behind. But in an early sign that the battle would go Fey’s way, many critics preferred 30 Rock Studio 60, wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker, “may have the classier ensemble and fancier verbiage . . . but at half the length and twice the amusement, 30 Rock has Alec Baldwin . . . playing Fey’s new boss as only a smidge more impish than the ruthless corporate soul-crusher he was in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross.”
The pilot found dashing right-wing network exec Jack Donaghy seeking to improve the ratings of Liz Lemon’s ailing women’s comedy program by making The Girlie Show less . . . girlie. To attract that ever-crucial eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old male demographic, Donaghy recruits Tracy Jordan, the irrepressible African American star of Tyler Perry-ish classics such as Who Dat Ninja? and Sherlock Homie. From his first moments on-screen, Alec Baldwin exudes monstrous magnetism; Tracy Morgan’s bratty but lovable intensity is equally apparent. But the rest of the comic elements took longer to fall into place.
“That first year, it was very difficult figuring out [what the show was],” Cannon remembers. “The intricate way scripts were constructed and written meant there were a lot of long hours. That first year, we would go to Tina’s apartment on the Upper West Side, maybe three or four of us. We would see her daughter Alice go to bed, and then we would still be there at six thirty in the morning when she got up.” Cannon recalls riding on the subway one day with fellow writer Jack Burditt when she touched her hair and a huge clump came out in her hand. “Burditt said, ‘I think you might be stressed!’ ”
Stress-related hair loss sounds like the kind of ailment that might befall Liz Lemon. A workaholic Wendy constantly tending to Neverland and her Lost Boys, Liz focused on the job to the detriment of her social life. If forced to choose between a romantic date or staying late at work followed by a night at home wrapped in her Slanket eating cheese and watching reality TV, there’s no question she’d pick the latter. In other words, 30 Rock made madcap comedy out of a woman putting work ahead of her personal life, just as millions of men do without fanfare.
Liz was an asexual character by design: frumpy and absolutely fine with that. Fey wanted to go against the prevailing Sex and the City glam single-woman stereotype—to figure out “what is the anti–Carrie Bradshaw,” says Tracey Wigfield, who started as writers’ assistant at 30 Rock, graduated to producer, and later created the NBC sitcom Good News. “Liz is very much a woman who is career-motivated. She just wants to start a relationship five years in,” when the passion has settled into easy, companionable coasting.
The show hit its cruising altitude in December 2006 with “Tracy Does Conan.” Written by Fey, the debut season’s seventh episode telegraphed the show’s willingness to embrace lunacy. Liz’s plan to break up with her creepy boyfriend is derailed by a workplace problem: she needs to wrangle Tracy into appearing on Conan O’Brien’s talk show. But Tracy is off his meds and hallucinating a blue monster (played by a hilariously unhinged Dratch, a runner-up prize for having lost out on the Jenna role). At one point, Liz finds Tracy literally pinned to the ceiling. The plot careens off the sitcom walls at maximum velocity, as Liz whizzes around Manhattan trying to juggle Jenna’s jealousy and Tracy’s psychosis, which his physician, Dr. Spaceman (pronounced Spah-CHEM-in), defines as “erratic tendencies and delusions brought on by excessive notoriety.” At the end of the episode, poor Liz is too tired to break up with her boyfriend; instead, she conks out on the sofa clutching a cheeseburger.
After the “Tracy Does Conan” episode, Brett Baer says the writers finally grasped what Fey was going for: an action-packed adrenaline whirl buzzing with pop-satirical references. “We all looked at each other and said, ‘Ohhhh!’ ” He sighs in wonderment. “The show worked in this super-heightened way, and we just felt, Nobody has ever done this before.” The antic physical comedy was matched at every turn by razor-sharp dialogue that sketched in a surprising amount of emotional detail about the characters, making you care about even the most ludicrous and cartoonish member of the menagerie. “We worked hard to see how much we could push the limit, and we found there was no limit, so we just kept pushing.”
That testing of boundaries resulted in “Black Tie,” the last of NBC’s original twelve-episode order. Thinking this was their swan song, the writers unleashed a berserk half-hour set at the birthday party of Prince Gerhard, an inbred Austrian aristocrat played with pathos (and one tiny doll hand) by Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens. Status-hungry Jenna pursues a romance with Prince Gerhard. Although he can’t dance (“Sadly, my body does not produce joint fluid”), they do share a fairy-tale moment before he drops dead, thanks to his inability to digest champagne.
This early episode also teases us with the prospect of a romance between Liz and Jack. When Liz asks her boss if this party invite constitutes a date, Jack dismisses the idea. (He dates only models and socialites.) Yet the chemistry between the two is palpable. At the end of the evening, Jack reaches out as if to caress Liz’s face—and instead removes from her neck the jewels he loaned her for the evening.
Fey informed the writers early on that Jack and Liz would never be a couple: 30 Rock wasn’t a rom-com, even if it bounced around some of the genre’s conventions. She said at the time, “I want to resist the temptation to turn it into a soap opera. Will they or won’t they get together? Who cares! Grey’s Anatomy is always going to beat us at that game. We’re just a comedy show.” Sure, Rhimes laced her shows with humor and occasional snark, but ultimately her narratives invited viewers to immerse themselves in the all-encompassing fantasy of Shondaland for an hour. Whereas, if you glazed out for just a few minutes of 30 Rock, you’d miss dozens of jokes and sight gags. Fey borrowed aspects of the classic screwball comedy—the witty, fast-paced banter, the mismatched cultural attitudes, the farcical situations—while ditching the consummation that traditionally awaited the couple by movie’s end. Liz and Jack cycle through relationships with other people over the show’s seven seasons, but none of these couplings is ultimately as compelling as Liz and Jack’s friendship. They are “work spouses” who admire each other, reserving their true passion for their jobs.
While “Black Tie” was shooting, NBC’s Kevin Reilly called to say that 30 Rock had been picked up for the rest of the season, despite poor ratings. (Studio 60, on the other hand, was canceled.) It went on to win the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. Taking the stage with her actors and producers surrounding her, Fey conveyed thanks to “our dozens and dozens of viewers.”
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Fey’s profile escalated from cult comedian to household name when she began satirizing look-alike Sarah Palin on SNL during the 2008 presidential race. But 30 Rock had a much stealthier approach to current affairs. Fey wanted “to do stories about politics in this sort of interpersonal way, about gender and economic and racial politics,” Carlock told one interviewer. Jack Donaghy often involves himself in Republican escapades: he funds a Trump-ish congressional candidate who wants to reduce big government to “no government,” dates former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who makes a guest appearance), and briefly leaves NBC to work for George W. Bush’s administr
ation.
Liz Lemon, on the other hand, is a bleeding-heart liberal whose beliefs often don’t hold up to scrutiny, or are undermined. One of my favorite 30 Rock episodes, “Rosemary’s Baby,” tests Liz’s cred as a feminist. She hires her hero, Rosemary Howard (played by Carrie Fisher), a radical TV writer from the seventies. But when Rosemary suggests The Girlie Show do a sketch in blackface, Liz stiffens: “We can’t do race stuff. It’s too sensitive!” Jack has no patience for Liz’s new political pretensions, declaring that she is not a radical like Rosemary: “You are like me. . . . You are a suit.” She realizes that Jack is right after he fires her and she gets a glimpse of Rosemary’s squalid hovel. Liz returns to her well-paid corporate gig at Rockefeller Center—where Jack (as if to prove you can do race stuff on network TV) is helping Tracy get over his family issues by mimicking the voices of black characters from TV shows such as Sanford and Son and Good Times.
The show’s run coincided with the rise of an online feminist blogosphere, with sites such as Feministing, AngryBlackBitch, and Jezebel casting a critical eye over everything from reproductive rights to sex toys to Hollywood double standards. In the 2011 episode “TGS Hates Women,” 30 Rock lampoons the so-called lady blogs with Joan of Snark, a thinly disguised version of Jezebel—aka “this really cool feminist website where women talk about how far we’ve come and which celebrities have the worst beach bodies.”
The site calls out TGS (The Girlie Show) for its sexism, provoking Liz to protest that she is a good feminist: “I support women. I’m like a human bra!” To prove it, she hires Abby (Cristin Milioti), a trendy young female comic, to instigate a “fem-o-lution” at TGS. When it turns out that Abby uses baby talk and dresses hypersexually, Liz accuses the young comedian of undermining the women’s movement. “What’s the difference between me using my sexuality and you using those glasses to look smart?” Abby retorts. Fey told NPR’s Terry Gross that the writers chose to explore ambivalence in the episode rather than offer a simplistic resolution. “It’s just such a tangled-up issue, the way that women present themselves . . . and the way women judge each other back and forth for it.”