A Tina Fey fan is a fan of Tina Fey, and that’s perfectly fine.
AsGreat Newsheads to air (Tuesdays at 9 p.m.
Her personality cracks me up.
Credit: Eric Liebowitz/NBC
She has no filter, she has no sense of boundaries.
Tina Fey brought my mother and sister and I with her on her family vacation.
I wasn’t in the military or, like, used to work on an oil rig.
So I was thinking about, well, what do I know?
What do I like talking about?
What do I think is funny?
And my mom just seemed like kind of a perfect pre-made character.
Not at UCB, necessarily, or even in college.
That had a little bit of [my mom] but she’s a different character.
Were you raised religious?
I was raised Catholic.
It seems to fall along, like, Jewish, Catholic, Italian lines.
My mom’s Italian and I was raised Catholic.
When you told your mom the show was happening, was there anything off limits?
In a weird way, she was like, weirdly not phased by it.
It would have been a disappointment if I hadn’t.
She rolls with things.
What about your sister and dad?
My sister is a writer on the show, so that was really helpful having her there.
She’s someone that you could be like, “Wait, what’s that thing mom always said?
What would she do in this situation?”
You know I love you and think you’re a perfect father."
But he has a good sense of humor.
I think he thinks it’s funny.
I hope he does!
We would write these scripts and act in them and make our parents watch them over and over again.
I remember saving money to buy a wig.
Like, we loved doing that.
What was your VHS masterpiece?
Our most ambitious one was a parody ofSense & SensibilitycalledStupid & Stupidity.
[Laughs] That was always really hard.
It was really ambitious but I think that one came out really good.
Leaping ahead a decade, what was your first formative career touchstone after college?
A huge game-changer in my life was getting hired as an assistant at30 Rock.
Do you remember the first time you made Tina laugh out loud?
[Laughs] No, but I remember more times when Ididn’t.
God, I remember it so vividly.
Don’t say it, it’s not funny.
You should say it."
In joining and helping launchThe Mindy Project, how different was your headspace as opposed to starting at30 Rock?
At30 Rock, I was starting knowing nothing.
OnMindy, I got that experience.
Not running a show, but maybe being a person or two under the person running the show.
All these other skills that they didn’t trust me with on30 Rock, I got to do onMindy.
And I also got very close to Mindy.
She’s a good friend of mine.
As the boss now, do you have a soft spot for people rising up the way you did?
Especially women writers' assistants.
What kind of writers' room did you want to assemble?
Especially in a writers' room.
You don’t want a rotten apple.
What do you recall of your Letterman page days?
My job was so bad I was paid $10 an hour.
That was the thing you aspired to.
I was poor, taking the bus in from my parents' house, and it wasn’t glamorous.
Running errands and getting treated like garbage.
So I think experiences like that are very helpful to get your eye on the prize.
You had done an internship at CNN prior to Letterman.
It seems like this was very much a big “nope” to ever going back there.
That’s the truth.
That’s me living my truth.
Did you ever meet him?
So I’ve seen him run by me, but we never interacted.
As a kid, what TV show spoke to you on your most creative level?
This might be an over-said answer, butSeinfeld.
That show appealed to me in a specific way.
It was comedy done like math, in a way.
As a kid, I remember there was something aboutSeinfeldthat just felt like such pure comedy.
And I also lovedSNL, always.
WasSNLever an option for you?
You’re in the NBC family.
I feel like there was a time I could have.
But I got in on30 Rockso early, and…
I don’t know, maybe I was just chicken and didn’t want to stay up all night.
I have to ask about current events, the ‘fake news’ of it all.
What are you being asked the most about this?
What’s your message?"
It was a less loaded workplace than it is where we’re standing now.
It couldn’t have been a more different workplace to examine two years ago.
Did you readthatNew York TimesMagazinearticlethe other day?
When I pitched this show, that was the comedy I was planning on mining from it.
And we shot the whole show before the election.
So there’s no Trump jokes or anything, and somewhat by design.
The show will always be about the characters and the dynamic between them.
It’s not going to be like John Oliver, skewering politics.
That’s not how it’s built.
I’d love to do more stuff about that.
I just think there’s so much to say.
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