Tina Fey is Liz Lemon and Everything Else on 30 Rock

This is a submission in pestyside's National Women's History Month Write Off.

In the fall of 2006, two new shows were getting ready to debut for NBC. The first had all the “proper breeding,” with genius writer Aaron Sorkin of West Wing, and Brad Whitford, also of West Wing, and Matthew Perry of Friends lined up as leads in the new dramatic series about a live comedy show. The second was a “mutt” of a show, with a late night comedy writer and a past-his-prime movie star as the leads in a new comedy series which was also about a live comedy show. Everyone assumed that TV wasn't big enough for the both of them, and that the heavyweight drama would crush the little comedy. The drama debuted to solid ratings, but then slowly lost viewers until it was finally canceled by the fourth-place network with nary a mourner for its passing. The second series debuted to tiny ratings, but was given a chance because that fourth-place network desperately needed another comedy on Thursday night. Given time, it found an audience, got renewed for a second season, and won an Emmy for Best Comedy Series.

The drama, of course, was Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, and the comedy is 30 Rock, which is the funniest, smartest comedy since Seinfeld. That's right, since Seinfeld. In retrospect, it seems a little stupid that everyone assumed that Aaron Sorkin, as good as he is, could write a better series about a live comedy show than Tina Fey, who had just finished a stint as the head writer on the live comedy show that both series were emulating, Saturday Night Live. This truly was the difference in the two shows, because what ultimately sank Studio 60 is that Sorkin made the ill-advised decision to try to write “the show within the show” as well as the show itself. In other words, he tried to include sketches of the live comedy show that Studio 60 would have shown if it had been a real show itself. Big problem – while Sorkin can write masterful, witty and funny dialogue, he can't write late night comedy sketches. Sorkin's sketches weren't funny, and they helped dragged down the show.

To some degree, Sorkin's inability to write good sketch comedy is no knock on him – it's clearly very hard to write good sketch comedy, as Saturday Night Live's ups and downs over the years have shown. In fact, I think it's easier to write a sitcom than it is to write sketch comedy, because 30 Rock is a very funny show, and it rarely, if ever, attempts to include more than a snippet of its “show within a show.” (In fact, an early plan to show full sketches of 30 Rock's “show within a show” on the Internet was wisely dropped before the series ever started). The person who is responsible for all this is the show's creator, writer, producer, and star, Tina Fey.

Elizabeth Stamatina “Tina” Fey got her start in comedy at The Second City, the long-running improvisational comedy group in Chicago, whose alumni include many members of the original SNL cast. In 1997, Fey herself got a job as a writer on SNL, and by 1999, she had become the show's first female head writer. The next year she became on the anchors on SNL's Weekend Update, the mock news part of the show, first teaming with Jimmy Fallon and then later, to my personal dismay, Amy Poehler. As a Weekend Update anchor, Fey ripped into celebrities and politicians alike with her dry, biting humor. (I personally always enjoyed her mocking imitation of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.) SNL has had good and bad stretches in its existence, and when Fey was head writer, the show, while not attaining the comedy heights of its glory years, nonetheless was consistently funny enough to earn a spot on my TiVo's season pass. SNL's precipitous drop-off after Fey's departure was made all the more obvious when she returned as guest host for SNL's first show after the four month long writer's strike, and SNL enjoyed its funniest show of the season.

Fey's success as both the head writer and actor on SNL is all the more remarkable when one considers the difficulties that women have experienced on SNL in the past, the most famous being Janeane Garofalo departing in the middle of her first season because of the show's attitude towards women. Fey appears to have effected significant change at the show, likely due to the critical success she had there, including an Emmy win and multiple WGA awards for writing. In front of the camera, she joined with Amy Poehler as the first all-female anchor duo on Weekend Update, and generally put more women in prominent roles in sketches than had previously been done.

SNL's loss of its head writer was Thursday Night Must See TV's gain, as Fey's considerable comedy skills are now on display on 30 Rock. Fey is Liz Lemon, head writer on “The Girlie Show”, 30 Rock's “show within a show.” Well, at least it was “The Girlie Show” until Lemon's new boss, Jack Donaghy, played masterfully by Alec Baldwin, gets ahold of it and decides that new talent is needed for “The Girlie Show”, which becomes “TGS with Tracy Jordan.” Tracy Jordan is played by Tracy Morgan, who I never thought was very good on SNL but is well-cast here as the low-brow, out-of-his mind star of such movies as “Who Dat Ninja?” and “Honkey Grandma be Trippin'” who Jack Donaghy brings on to “TGS”. Other supporting actors include Jane Krakowski (of Ally McBeal) as Jenna Maroney, the displaced star of “The Girlie Show,” Jack McBrayer as Kenneth Parcell, the naïve NBC page, and Keith Powell and Judah Friedlander as members of Liz Lemon's writing staff. 30 Rock is based on Fey's experiences from SNL and from all appearances, SNL was a very funny and very strange place to work.

Much of 30 Rock focuses on the interplay between Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, the “Executive Vice President for East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming” for GE, the parent company of GE. Alec Baldwin was no doubt cast as Donaghy based on his work on SNL, where he has been a frequent, and one of the best, guest hosts. Baldwin plays Donaghy as incredibly arrogant and massively insecure all at once. He worships Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, dispenses both career and love advice to Lemon, and has co-dependent relationships with both his mother and his ex-wife. Baldwin is a tour de force, delivering lines with machine-gun staccato that will have you laughing out loud. Tracy Morgan, showing his range as Tracy Jordan, probably has it easy playing the crazy-like-a-fox-maybe-but-definitely-crazy star, but nonetheless, it works. He's assisted greatly in his efforts by the two actors who play members of his entourage, Grizz and Dot Com, who humor Jordan's insanity because they know he's the meal ticket. Baldwin and Morgan (especially Baldwin) provide 30 Rock the same kind of energy that George Costanza and Cosmo Kramer provided to Seinfeld.

But much like George and Kramer, you can't have either Jack or Tracy as the focus of the show, because the zanier characters are only funny playing off a straight character like a Jerry Seinfeld (who happens guest star on season two). Tina Fey as Liz Lemon is the Jerry Seinfeld character, although it must be said that she's a better actor than Seinfeld ever was. While admittedly that only sets the bar as high as “don't laugh while delivering your own lines, Fey has been recognized with a Golden Globe for her acting, which is all the more impressive since she considers herself a writer first. Fey's the glue that holds the show together. We feel her pain as she deals with either Jack or Tracy's latest insanity while at the same time trying to hold her personal life together. Not incidentally, just like Seinfeld, there's never a “moral to the story” - some feelgood moment to teach all a lesson about life. No, 30 Rock is no moral lessons, no subtle preaching; it's just funny – very funny.

And it owes it all to Tina Fey.

The Complete First Season of 22 Episodes on DVD also includes audio commentaries and deleted scenes that are actually funny and worth watching, a rarity among DVD extras.