Tina Fey Talks 30 Rock

Posted on October 11, 2006

Tina Fey is best known as being the head writer for Saturday Night Live, where she spent nine years. She jumped at the chance to write her own show, and the result is the half hour sitcom 30 Rock which premieres tonight on NBC. It's an unusual career arc for a writer: she not only writes the show, she stars in it.

"I wanted to do a workplace comedy because my work has always been an enormous part of my life," she says. "As much as I loved Sex and the City, that was not my life, I couldn't even imagine writing that because I never, well, dated anybody."

"All I know about is going to work and how do you get along with the people at work." Fey's so into working, in fact, that despite being the mother of a year-old daughter, she briefly considered doing "30 Rock" and the popular "Weekend Update" segment on "Saturday Night Live." But motherhood has provided her with a "priority adjustment," and she decided against entering into full-fledged work-aholism.

Instead, she says, she's concentrating on "30 Rock" and is working on a draft of a new movie for Paramount as a followup to the successful "Mean Girls," the 2004 Lindsay Lohan movie that Fey wrote and co-starred in - meaning that even if "30 Rock" doesn't work out, she's likely to remain a comedy force to be reckoned with for some time.

"I am open to all offers if they are extremely lucrative," Fey says with a laugh.

30 Rock is quite funny and Alec Baldwin is hilarious. In fact, 30 Rock is much funnier than the other new show about a late night show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. You can see the premiere online of 30 Rock for free here.

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