(From left) Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan star in '30 Rock', premiering Wednesday night at 7 on NBC.
The standard advice for writers - besides earn a teacher's certificate and marry rich - is to write what you know.
Tina Fey takes the last tip to heart.
Best known as the Weekend Update anchor with a sly sense of humour on Saturday Night Live, Fey spent six years on the sketch show and was its first female head writer. Now she stars as Liz Lemon, an intelligent, acerbic head writer on a fictional variety show, The Girlie Show, in NBC's 30 Rock, premiering Wednesday, October 11. In addition to starring, Fey also writes and produces the new sitcom.
"In some ways there is a lot of personnel overlap" to SNL, she says on a break in her office at, coincidentally, 30 Rock - NBC's East Coast home at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York.
Castmates include Rachel Dratch and Tracy Morgan, both of whom Fey worked with on 'SNL', and Jack McBrayer and Scott Adsit, from Fey's time at Second City in Chicago.
"The difference is no live audience," she says. "Lorne (Michaels, executive producer of both 30 Rock and SNL) kept telling us to have a table read as close to shooting as possible, and that way you remember where the laughs were."
opening scene
So it seems like a cosy set, given all of Fey's personal connections. She also draws on her own experiences and pet peeves.
In the opening scene, Liz is outside Rockefeller Plaza, about to buy a hot dog. Some jerk on a cellphone cuts in line. She points out that there is a line, to which he retorts that he's only buying a hot dog - as if the others were there to usher in a new moon.
Liz does what we all wish we would. She buys up the vendor's inventory and distributes the franks to the folks on line and everyone she encounters on her way back to the office. She blows $150, but she makes her point.
"I do have that behaviour," Fey says with a laugh. "It always makes my husband very nervous. I will insert myself into things that are not my business. I have never gone that far as buying the hot dogs. I once said a really bad curse word to a person at the Little Pie Company, and I was picking up pies to go to a bridal shower."
As Liz delivers the hot dogs, there's something very reminiscent of The Mary Tyler Moore Show about the sequence; the single can-do career woman in the big city. Clearly, she needs a gruff boss.
Enter Alec Baldwin, who is superb at playing self-satisfied men who would benefit by being left alone with hungry, bored preschoolers on a rainy day. He plays Jack Donaghy, who invented the trivection oven, which can cook a turkey in 22 minutes. Incidentally, Fey acknowledges that there really is such an oven. She found it on a General Electric website.
fast cooker
"I'm wondering when we will get the in-house phone call," she says, alluding to GE's ownership of NBC.
That fast cooker may be a grand invention, but that doesn't give Jack the intellect, taste or ability to oversee television shows. No matter, though, he is promoted far outside his area of expertise. Baldwin, like all actors, has experienced such executives.
"I don't want to get into some disparaging thing about that," Baldwin says. "Post '90s, the business is awash with those people. It's run by people with MBAs and lawyers and chief financial officers. Lawyers are running the studios, and the creative people are kept penned into the room. That is something that has happened in this business. We are now coming into the age that is the complete, the fully realised age of the noncreative, creative executive. Every one of them is that."
Still, he does not want Jack to be a one-dimensional suit. "I don't think it is fun to be an overbearing boss," Baldwin says. "One of the things I said to them is, 'I want this guy to be someone. I want him to want to learn and watch old Dick Van Dyke episodes to see what is truly funny.' I didn't want to be that guy who is just a foil."
At least based on a rough version of the pilot (at this writing, the final product was not yet ready), Baldwin has nothing to worry about. Even though Jack is a blowhard, his willingness to learn is apparent, for those who look deeply enough.
Initially, the show-within-a-show device was conceived as a sketch show starring Dratch who, contrary to some reports, will continue on 30 Rock in multiple roles. The show Liz writes is now a variety show starring Jenna Maroney, played by Jane Krakowski (Ally McBeal). This role will give Krakowski the opportunity to flaunt her singing and dancing, for which she won a Tony Award in Nine.
In the pilot, Jack insists that Liz meet with movie star Tracy Jordan (Morgan), who has an intermittent relationship with sanity. Liz grudgingly takes the meeting, which includes going with Jordan and his entourage to a chicken-and-waffles joint and hanging out at a Bronx strip club. By the end of this insane day, they have bonded.
disparate characters
Still, there has to be conflict among the players for the jokes to work, and given the disparate characters, conflicts are a given.
Fey, however, is anything but cocky that the show will be a hit. "I grew up as part of a generation that had really great sitcoms," she says, praising Norman Lear, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett.
"The biggest dream was to have your own half-hour comedy show," she says. "That was the biggest thing ever, and at least for a week, I'll have that, and how many people can say that?"