If Saturday Night Live has seemed a little shaky so far this season, that might be because Tina Fey—writer since 1997, head writer and cast member since 1999, and largely responsible for the show's last creative renaissance—left SNL to write, produce, and star in the new situation comedy 30 Rock. Fey plays the head writer for The Girlie Show, a fictional NBC sketch-comedy series that undergoes a retooling when new network executive Alec Baldwin orders Fey to push her friend Jane Krakowski aside to make room for loose-screw comedian Tracy Morgan. Early reviews for 30 Rock have mostly been strong, but ratings have been weak, and with NBC recently announcing major budget cuts, the future of the brightest new comedy of the fall may be bleak. The A.V. Club interviewed Fey the day after her first episode aired, prior to the NBC announcement, and she discussed her comedy training and what it's like to make the transition from sketch comedy to sitcoms.
The A.V. Club: Between writing, performing, and producing 30 Rock, do you have any spare time these days?
Tina Fey: It's pretty tight. I go home at night, take a shower, eat something, and go right to sleep.
AVC: And your baby girl is being taken care of at some point during all this?
TF: She is presumably being well cared for. [Laughs.] No, she's good. She comes and visits here on the set, and on good days, I get to see her for a couple hours in the early morning.
AVC: 30 Rock is shot in New York, correct? That's unusual for a sitcom.
TF: Yeah, we're shooting in New York, on location around the city, and then we're in a studio in Queens. We're really lucky, because we know it's not cheap. I think part of the reason Alec Baldwin was into doing this show was because he lives here, and now he gets to stay here. I'm thrilled. Whenever we get to shoot in Manhattan proper, we're all super-excited. We can get good coffee and pizza.
AVC: It's hard to remember sometimes that shows with a strong New York identity, like Seinfeld, were actually shot in Los Angeles.
TF: Well, Seinfeld kept a real New York vibe even though it was shot in L.A., just because the characters were such New Yorkers. And they always kept the references very accurate. But then if you look at it, it's so clearly either the Paramount lot or the Universal lot when they walk down the street. It's crazy.
AVC: Why did 30 Rock start so late in the fall season?
TF: A couple of reasons. One was that I couldn't start until Saturday Night Live was over, and SNL went into the middle of May. So I had to do that first, then quickly assemble a staff. We didn't start writing until July 5, and didn't start shooting until the last week of August. We needed that turnaround time. Also, I think NBC probably wanted a month window between the start of our show and the start of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, or else some people would've been confused.
AVC: Have you watched Studio 60?
TF: I've seen the first two episodes.
AVC: What are your impressions?
TF: I can't do impressions of Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry. [Pause.] A little joke. No, no impressions.
AVC: You'd rather not comment?
TF: Yeah.
AVC: 30 Rock is a little different from other current sitcoms, in that it's fast-paced, but the pace comes from the actors, not the editing. In the second episode, for example, someone asks about Jane Krakowski's singing, and she breaks into song. Without a cutaway.
TF: That's a nice piece of theater timing.
AVC: And it makes good use of a Tony award-winner.
TF: Exactly. We are going to work her like a dog. Make her sing for her supper.
AVC: Krakowski plays your best friend and the star of the show-within-the-show, and she fears for her job when Tracy Morgan joins the cast. Something similar happened with you and your friend Rachel Dratch, who was replaced after she starred in the original 30 Rock pilot.
TF: It's really not the same. With Jane, we're playing off her insecurity and everything being off-kilter. And there was really none of that in the real situation, with Dratch. Everyone was cool with it.
AVC: So you didn't have any bad feelings that you had to replace your friend?
TF: No. And I think that's a negative way to put it, "You had to replace your friend." We made adjustments to a pilot. That happens all the time. And Dratch and I, as Tracy would say, we go way back, like spinal cords and car seats. We've been writing partners at different times. There's no stigma to us making a change to make something better.
AVC: And she's still going to be on the show every week?
TF: Not every single week, but three-quarters of the weeks, probably. Which is sort of the same deal that a lot of the people have from the cast, because it's such a big cast. She's going to play a series of different characters.
AVC: Making the decision to have her play a different character almost every week is like announcing up front that 30 Rock won't be 100 percent realistic.
TF: Yeah, although I think that if you were watching the show as a one-off, you wouldn't necessarily think, tonally, that she's doing anything that stands out as "crazy." But if you're following the whole season, yeah, you'll see her come back and come back. I think it's something that'll help the show be unique. And I think it brings a little sketch sensibility into a show where you're not going to see sketches.
AVC: Why haven't there been more glimpses of the show-within-a-show's sketches?
TF: We didn't want to waste the 21 minutes we have showing sketches. We're trying to deal with the characters. And also, there's something inherently reductive to showing the show-within-a-show. It doesn't work for me. Maybe we'll do it if it helps us story-wise. But I don't know.
AVC: That seems to be the problem they're having on Studio 60.
TF: Well, I couldn't possibly say. [Laughs.]
AVC: What sitcoms have you been a fan of?
TF: I grew up with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and both of Bob Newhart's shows. And, well, the whole Norman Lear era. When you look back on those Lear shows now, some of them are so hilariously preachy, you can't believe that they got away with it. But the shows were also so character-driven, and really, really funny. And of course I grew up watching a lot of Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days and Love Boat and stuff like that, which was more sugarcoated.
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