Tina Fey Interview on Netflix Series The Four Seasons, TV Return, SNL

Tina Fey is wearing a matching pajama set, perched on the edge of an oversized chair and discussing her tenure as a receptionist at the Evanston, Illinois, YMCA in the early ’90s. The men were gross, the commute from Chicago was long, but it paid for her Second City improv classes.

This intimate scene plays out onstage for 5,000 people. It’s the audience Q&A closer during a Detroit stop on Fey and Amy Poehler’s Restless Leg Tour, where one attendee even asks the women, without any context, whether she should quit her job. (The answer is yes.) The two finish each show like this. They tailored the 90-minute set to their preferred wardrobes and bedtimes as much as their devoted fans’ tastes. Fey and Poehler can make it back to their respective hotel rooms and into their real PJs by 10 o’clock.

Later, Fey tells me about how things went the last time she tried to stay out long past midnight. It was February’s Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary. One of the most successful and recognizable figures to graduate from Studio 8H, Fey returned as a staff writer for the NBC special. And she intended to celebrate. “I’ve never been able to get over the fact that I left the 40th afterparty before Prince’s surprise set,” she says. “So the whole week leading up to the 50th, I drank water, I went to bed early, I saved it all up. But when I got to the afterparty, I couldn’t find any of my friends, and obviously there was no chance of Prince, so I thought, ‘Actually, I’m out.’ “

The parties are never what she remembers, anyway. It’s the planning, the problem-solving and the thrilling surrender to a finished product — of which there’ve been many. Over the quarter century since Fey broke out as an SNL wunderkind, the 54-year-old created and starred in 30 Rock, produced six other TV series, starred in more than a dozen films and wrote Mean Girls. She then made Mean Girls­ — more of a pop culture institution than a movie — into a 2018 Broadway musical with her composer husband, Jeff Richmond, and in turn adapted that into a movie musical.

And there are her collaborations with Poehler, this latest one a comedic homage to their 30-year friendship. Most material gets recycled from city to city, except for a segment that puts them back at the “Weekend Update” anchor desk they shared at SNL. During the first of two Detroit shows in April, 15 minutes of fresh material includes a joke about Elon Musk while an image of a burning Tesla projects behind them. The sold-out crowd, most of them white women and one of them my mother, scream-laughs in approval.

“Cranking these things out is not easy — they’re true labors,” says Poehler. “Yet no one is happier to get it right than Tina. When she comes up with a good idea, a good joke or some new take, she still gets delighted.”

Her newest take is on middle age. Fey and fellow 30 Rock writers Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher have adapted The Four Seasons, Alan Alda’s 1981 comedy about boomers navigating midlife crises, as a Netflix series out May 1. She stars alongside Steve Carell, Colman Domingo and Will Forte, marking her first regular on-camera TV role since 30 Rock wrapped in 2013. But over a few hours and many cups of coffee — discussing her evolving work-life balance, the pains of making the second Mean Girls movie and her “irreplaceable” mentor, Lorne Michaels — the multihyphenate almost exclusively refers to herself as a writer. She takes multiple detours into astrology and the Enneagram along the way, as well.

“While we’re on nonsense,” says Fey, “there’s all that talk about love languages. I give acts of service. If I like you, my way of showing that is to be like, ‘I wrote this for you.’ I try to help you fix the thing you’re doing. And if I don’t like you, I’m going to write you something so good that you’re going to be ashamed. Either way, I’m always out here hustling.”

***

Fey does not show up in a black car to the French café. It’s a rainy April morning in the Paris of the Midwest, and she arrives on foot. She sports a baseball cap embroidered with her production company’s logo: a doodle of firstborn Alice, then a toddler, dressed as the NBC peacock for Halloween. Alice turned 19 in September. Now it’s just Fey, Richmond and their youngest, 13-year-old Penelope, at home.

Her presence is more obvious as soon as she pulls off her cap. Garnier kept that mane under contract for a reason. Still, she is only approached once. Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, happens to be holding court in a nearby booth. He thanks her for putting the city on the tour itinerary before asking for a photo. Fey slips into her well-worn self-deprecation, talking her way out of a selfie by explaining that she’s not wearing makeup. This is half true.

“He seems very nice,” she says, voice lowered as she departs the mayor’s table, “but I do not know that man’s politics.” (Duggan, long a moderate Democrat, very controversially announced in December that he would run as an independent in the 2026 Michigan gubernatorial race.)

She says she’s not as reserved as she once was, but she’s clearly still skilled at vetting people. “Tina, like my husband, is a Taurus,” says Domingo, who didn’t know Fey personally before he boarded The Four Seasons. “When you first meet her, I wouldn’t say she’s guarded, but she’s assessing. She sizes you up, figures out her way in. The moment it clicks, she’s affectionate and warm and funny. I think I got there faster because I’m from Philadelphia.”

Fey, who grew up just outside Philly in Upper Darby, says she’s learned to expedite this assessment period.

“Parenthood makes you push through because you have to demonstrate for your kids how not to be shy, so I’m better than I used to be,” says Fey. “Steve Carell and I made a whole movie together without ever breaking through to the other side because we’re both very shy,” she segues, referring to the 2009 two-hander Date Night. “Without anyone to make us talk, he and I would both sit in polite silence. After working with this big group, I feel like Steve and I are actually all-the-way friends now.”

Early in her career, Fey was frequently dubbed a workaholic. It’s an exhaustively overused label but perhaps a fitting description for anyone with the capacity to write, produce and star in 138 episodes of a sitcom. It does not hold for somebody who actively seeks out time to improve her watercolor portraiture and cooking skills, two of Fey’s joys. She’ll watch every chickpea recipe on TikTok. That’s the only social media platform where she lurks these days, having deleted a burner Instagram after she found it made her dislike some of the people she knew in real life. (No, she won’t name names.) She’s trying to read one book a month and jokes that having a daughter in middle school is the only thing keeping her from crafting full time. She suspects she and her husband are New York City lifers, even if, come summer, her personality is Fire Island. “The dumpy side,” she clarifies, “not the business side with the boys.”

There are plenty of jobs she wants to take, mostly making work with friends. She and longtime collaborators Robert Carlock and Sam Means just wrote an NBC pilot for 30 Rock pal Tracy Morgan. He has his colorful reputation, most recently prompting a 10-minute delay at a Knicks game after vomiting on the Madison Square Garden court. But Morgan’s a Fey loyalist, and she didn’t have to put up with him regularly threatening to quit 30 Rock as she did with co-star Alec Baldwin. “If you go to Knicks games 300 days a year, one of those days, you’ve got to be sick,” says Fey, assuring me Morgan recovered from his food poisoning in time for the shoot. “It could happen to any of us, but it did happen to Tracy.”

There are also plenty of jobs Fey doesn’t want to take: hosting another awards show, for example. “Nikki Glaser killed it at the Globes, and she should keep that job forever,” Fey says of the event she and Poehler emceed four times. “Me? No. I shouldn’t say never, but it’s such a high risk for such low reward.”

How she spends her time is more important to her than ever. One Restless Leg act finds Fey delivering a PowerPoint-style recap of her and Poehler’s post-SNL lives, and it’s not all funny. She talks about being left unmoored by the 2015 loss of her father, Don Fey, a man she lionized with an essay in her 2011 memoir, Bossypants. Her mother, Jeanne, spent her last years sharing Fey and Richmond’s Upper West Side apartment before her 2024 death.

“This sandwich generation stuff, having your kids and an aging parent in the same house, it’s wonderful … but it also really takes a lot out of you,” says Fey. “My mom passed away in the summer, my older daughter went to college in August and my husband [Richmond is also a producer and director] and I went to work on The Four Seasons in the fall. That kept me in the world. It saved me from just shrinking up like a little granny apple head.”

Like much of what warrants a green light in Hollywood, The Four Seasons is an update on established intellectual property. Sources say Netflix beat out Apple and Amazon for the project. Whether that title is enough to goose subscriber interest is unclear. Neither Lang nor Wigfield had seen the film before Fey coaxed them into watching. A digital ghost, it is not presently available on any streaming platform, even for purchase or rental. The lone video store in Los Angeles that has a copy only carries it on Blu-ray, not DVD. To watch it before meeting with Fey, I resorted to texting a film editor friend — film editors can find anything — to track down a bootleg torrent.

“Now you have to give me $20,” Fey scolds. “I’ll get it to Alan.”

When the film was released, seeing her favorite comic actors (Alda and Carol Burnett) play a married couple blew a tween Fey’s mind, even if some of the themes were over her head. Alda blessed the remake, is a credited producer and makes a cameo in one episode. Like his film, the series follows three couples — Fey and Forte, Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver, Domingo and Italian playwright-actor Marco Calvani — over quarterly vacations as their dynamic is upended when one of the men leaves his wife and starts bringing a younger woman (Erika Henningsen). Aging, parenting adult children, long-term monogamy and stresses on old friendships are examined over lengthy dinner-table scenes. It’s a comedy where shit gets real. In short: timely for Fey.

“When I was younger and anybody said you’ve got to have some heart in a script, I’d always go, ‘Fuck heart! This is comedy!’ ” says Forte, who worked with Fey at SNL and 30 Rock. “The further you get into this work, the more you realize that the heart stuff is what makes people want to watch this stuff. And Tina can crystallize those things, especially with dialogue, in a way that I’ve never been able to find.”

This is not the joke-joke-joke style of writing that people may expect from her, but Fey’s sensibility is no less apparent. “Very early in writing the first Mean Girls movie, I told Lorne, ‘It’s going to be about relational aggression among girls,’ ” she says. “He was like, ‘Right, right, but they can have nice outfits and cool cars, too.’ I’ve learned that you can make your thing as smart or true as you want and still try to make it commercial.”

***

Michaels and Fey are very close. She’s not the only former staffer to have such a rapport with her old boss, but it is a rarefied class. She’s worked for Universal TV, alongside Michaels, since she moved from Chicago to join his NBC sketch show in 1997. And with speculation about who might take the 80-year-old’s job upon his departure from SNL an intramural sport among the entertainment media — often fueled by Michaels himself — Fey’s name has long been in the mix.

Then Michaels walked the red carpet at the delayed 2023 Emmys, the one that happened in January 2024. A reporter floated the possibility of Fey as a successor to the man himself. He responded by saying she “could easily” do the job. Hundreds of publications picked up the comment, many interpreting his two words as an endorsement.

Michaels soon reversed course on retirement talk. He says he has no plans to leave anytime soon. But that doesn’t make the subject any less the third rail for nearly everybody in the SNL orbit. I broach the Fey “could easily” remark with Poehler, and she very politely shuts me down. “Me on that would be so clickbaity,” she says. “I will say that I feel like there are very few things that Tina wouldn’t do well in this world.”

Adds Fey of Michaels’ comment, “It was nice of him to say that, and I love him very much.” She has no response to the suggestion of ever taking the job herself. “He’s irreplaceable,” she says. “His set of gifts and skills are entirely unique. His eye for talent! He’s one of the last three people in show business who actually understand everything. I’ll leave it at that.”

Fey has sought Michaels’ advice throughout her career. Jon Hamm credits the pair with helping the Mad Men star not get stuck playing Don Draper types before either really knew him. “After I hosted SNL the first time, Tina called Lorne and was like, ‘Is this guy even funny?’ ” says Hamm, who now counts Fey among his closest friends in the business. Michaels confirmed, and Fey put Hamm on 30 Rock: “My work on that show, which got more and more ridiculous, showed everyone that I was down to clown — that I was looking for funny projects.”

She now leans on Michaels for the big stuff when she finds herself at an impasse. Fey credits him with helping her make the movie musical of Mean Girls a reality, a process she does not describe as easy. “[Paramount] kept moving the line of what it would take to get it made; you would’ve thought this wasn’t a piece of IP that they knew about,” she says of the 2024 release that grossed $104 million on a $36 million budget. “If I was boots on the ground, Lorne was the general. He was helping me say, ‘Yes, for sure,’ to the studio and then figure out how to still get everything done.”

Fey is an achiever, a fact that was pseudoscientifically confirmed during a 2022 girls trip. She was vacationing with former SNL colleagues Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Emily Spivey — “That’s the core, the group chat,” says Fey — in upstate New York. Poehler had taken an interest in the Enneagram, a personality classification system that places individuals into one of nine interconnected categories, so she hired an expert to test and analyze each of the women’s responses. (Hardly new, the Enneagram seems to be having a moment — Mike White was having his entire White Lotus cast take the test as well.)

Fey got No. 3, The Achiever, described by the Enneagram Institute as “ambitious, competent and energetic, they can also be status conscious and highly driven for advancement.” She kind of buys it, more than astrology anyway. At least this is based on a questionnaire, she says. And it does align with her priorities, even if the achievements aren’t necessarily her own.

“The impulse to hide and retire is very strong because I do think it’s time to help new voices get in the mix,” she says. “It’s something I’m already doing, but I want to do more. Even on the walk over here I was like, ‘I am so tired of hearing from me. Surely everyone else is tired of hearing from the same people over and over again.’ “

***

At Restless Leg’s pajama-clad conclusion, Fey lingers on her old YMCA gig a little longer. No, she did not particularly enjoy it, answering the audience member’s question, but she is tickled to recall the mix of overprotective North Shore mothers and eccentric old men who’d pass through the lobby. “Why have I never made that into a multicam show?” she asks herself. “Because I hate money.”

Fey is always pitching. She says the Morgan project is funny and she’s hopeful it moves forward, but she is candid about the fact that broadcast’s current approach to comedy may be hastening its own death. There is an industry-wide desire for more sitcoms, yet they are absent from the schedule for much of the year. “You can’t program comedy only 13 weeks a year and expect people to come to you for comedy,” she says, noting there’s no quick fix. “They have to reclaim that space. And it’s going to be a little bit like these tariffs. You’re just going to have to suffer for 10 years.”

Lowering her face within a few inches of the table, Fey speaks directly into the iPhone recording our conversation: “She didn’t say ‘tariffs.’ She didn’t bring up anything about tariffs. She does not understand tariffs.”

One of Fey’s running bits is that her TV output has never pulled the same audiences or paydays as that of the Chuck Lorres of the world. You’re more likely to hear her talk about 30 Rock‘s low ratings (it ranked 102 out of 142 shows in its first season) than its three straight Emmy wins for best comedy. But if she ever earnestly chased the highest echelon of commercial success, the impulse has apparently left her. “I’ve never had the brain to be like, ‘You know what the market’s looking for these days? Twins!’ ” she says. “I don’t know how to work backwards. The fact that I tried to follow 30 Rock with The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt [a sitcom about a woman who escapes a bunker after 15 years in captivity] shows you I have no sense for the business.”

It’s the penultimate self-deprecation. I counter by asking what she thinks the business wants from her at this juncture in her career. “What does Hollywood want from me?” Fey repeats, allowing herself a few seconds to think of an answer that might delight her. “A tasteful facelift.”

This story appeared in the April 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.