Tina Fey in All Seasons

I’m surely not alone in considering Tina Fey a national treasure. She has oodles of talent as a performer, and is a welcome MC at televised events. But I want to focus here on her brilliance as a writer, someone who can look at facets of our culture run amok and synthesize them into comedy gold.  

 Fey has been involved with television since her Saturday Night Live days (basically 1997-2006, though who can forget her return as Sarah Palin before the 2008 election?) In 2006 she created and starred in 30 Rock, an hilarious satire of a TV network, and she was also responsible for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which I found weird and funny. As a screenwriter, she made a brilliant debut with the 2004 teen comedy, Mean Girls. Who but Tina Fey would be smart enough to read a self-help book about adolescent bad behavior, sociologist Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, and fashion it into a hit movie?

 It helped a great deal that the film was populated by rising young stars, including Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried, along with Fey herself (in a teacher role) and best bud Amy Poehler, playing a particularly indulgent mom. This now-classic satire of high school girl-cliques has ultimately become a part of the American vocabulary, labeling self-improved and self-satisfied young women as “The Plastics” and introducing the concept of a “burn book” full of deliciously malicious gossip. (Clearly this reference is what led tech journalist Kara Swisher to publish in 2004 her Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. I’m also amused that the main non-conformist girl in the film, the one who aims to bring down The Plastics for reasons of her own, is dubbed Janis Ian, immortalizing the young singer/songwriter who had expressed her own teen angst through major pop hits like “At Seventeen.”)

 So potent has Mean Girls been that it was reincarnated, with Fey’s help, as a 2018 Broadway musical and a subsequent 2024 film adaptation. But Fey has not been idle since. It intrigues me that her most recent project is a mini-series which has just been renewed for its second season on Netflix. Again she chose her source carefully: a 1981 film written, directed by, and starring the wonderful Alan Alda. Alda’s The Four Seasons, which (natch!) features a lot of Vivaldi on the soundtrack, chronicles three well-heeled married couples who are close friends and always vacation together. Over the course of a particularly eventual year, one husband strays in dramatic fashion, and the others begin to question their lives and their values. The cast is first-rate (Carol Burnett plays Alda’s hyper-efficient wife, and Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston, and Rita Moreno are the others in the friend-group). It was nice to see, at the beginning of the Netflix mini-series, the now eighty-nine-year-old Alda in a gracious cameo role.

 The first season of Fey’s Four Seasons miniseries essentially expands on the basic concept of Alda’s film, showing mature adults—long settled into marriages and careers—suddenly re-thinking their life-choices. It’s interesting to see Fey, who essentially plays the Carol Burnett role, wrestling with being a middle-aged person. We’re so used to her focusing in her projects on teenagers and on career gals: now she’s portraying a wife and the mom of a college-age daughter, someone who has made good choices but is starting to wonder what it all means. At 55, as a wife and a mother of two, Fey is clearly beginning to contemplate the full trajectory of a mature life. And we get to come along for the ride.