Tina Fey and ’30 Rock’ Friends Lang Fisher, Tracey Wigfield on Their ‘Four Seasons’ Reunion

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When Tina Fey set her mind to remaking one of her favorite films from her childhood, Alan Alda’s 1981 comedy The Four Seasons, she immediately recruited two of her favorite collaborators… even if they hadn’t seen the source material. But as soon as Fey’s fellow 30 Rock writers room alums, Lang Fisher (Never Have I Ever) and Tracey Wigfield (Great News, Saved By the Bell) caught up — and Universal TV secured the rights — they sold their co-created remake to Netflix.

Their serialized spin on The Four Seasons, for which Fey, Fisher and Wigfield served as showrunners, unleashes all eight episodes of its first season May 1 on Netflix. Speaking ahead of the launch, Fey (subject of a THR cover story) and the rest of the trio talked about the choices they made in executing the mature source material, optimism for a rebound of the TV business and all being in the same writers room for the first time in over a decade.

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Tina, this was your passion project. How did you get Lang and Tracey on board? 

TINA FEY I was chasing it for a long time, more than five years. I’d spoken to Alan early on, got his blessing to pursue it and I think Universal thought they had the rights and then we all realized… we didn’t. So, it was a process of getting the right people to sign off. 

LANG FISHER We’d been talking about a show the three of us could do together, and Tina had mentioned the movie a couple of times. Finally, we were like, “OK, we’ll watch the movie!” Tracey and I were instantly like, “This is a great premise for a show.”

It’s a departure from your writing styles. It’s more serious and it’s very middle-aged.

TRACEY WIGFIELD Knowing Tina would star in this is what excited me because it felt tonally different than anything we’d done before. It’s grounded, it gets into deeper emotional stuff. It’s adult, more true to us, because Lang and I were coming off of high school shows.

FEY The appeal for me is that, the older you get, the more you think about the shooting experience. This is just us in comfortable places having a nice time.

FISHER Right now, people are craving gentleness, and I think that you get that here. Because the world is full of terrors.

More series seem to have three showrunners. How’d that work? 

FEY I don’t know how we got away with three — it’s not like we had a green screen unit.

WIGFIELD Three is a lot, but didn’t you both feel like you still had a full-time job? I’ve done it solo multiple times. The only difference here is that I didn’t have a mental breakdown.

FISHER I didn’t cry once! There are a lot of shows with multiple showrunners where, by the end of the season, they’ve split into different rooms and don’t speak to each other. We did not have too many cooks.

FEY Please don’t hold it against us that we had a nice time making this. 

The Four Seasons.

JON PACK/Netflix

Knowing this is in all three of your voices, in addition to the other writers, what do you think your individual strengths are in the writers room?

FEY I feel like Lang is wonderfully vigilant in a rewrite. She’s connecting the dots, getting us from A to B in a way that is just really rigorous. Tracey has a great feel for what’s corny. She knows what’s emotionally accurate. Not that she isn’t also good at breaking story, but I feel like she has great judgment of how people talk. Like, “That’s bullshit. I don’t want to see that. That’s not real.” 

WIGFIELD Lang and I were both in our twenties when learned how to do this job from Tina. So, I know a million things Tina’s good at, but the most impressive thing that I learned from her how to be a showrunner who listens. A lot of showrunners are like, “Here are some ideas. Do something with them.” Also, if you have a scene that just seems kind of bad and you don’t know why, Tina will be like, “let me get my hands on it.” Then she brings it back and it’s the best. 

FISHER  I would say Tina is just good at coming up with really funny apt observations about human behavior. It’s always true and from an angle you’ve never thought of.

FEY I think we’re all just flexible in our thinking. No one on this show was locked in on having anything be one way. 

FISHER I think we’re all really tired. (Laughs). So, nothing’s precious. 

The narrative in the TV business has been pretty rough the last few years, some might call it a hellscape. What is your take on the climate and what it means for less established writers?

WIGFIELD I started on 30 Rock in season two, I think 2007, as a writers assistant. And I remember the writers in the room would talk about how much it sucked then, how the golden age was over, how all the writers from Friends got giant deals and ruined it for everyone because none of them made anything under those deals. Then, five years ago, there was this giant bubble. And, now, yes, we are in a hellscape. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I think it’s getting better.

FISHER There are difficulties now, especially for young writers. You don’t get a 22-episode season that fills your year. You have to kind of patch together a year of work. That’s very hard. But, in some ways, things have gotten better. Our rooms are really respectful. We’re still holding our writers to a high standard and only putting in the best stuff, but we’re we’re listening to everyone — and, hopefully a new writer who’s maybe on a shorter season, they’re feeling more comfortable about speaking up or pitching ideas. It’s not a scary as it used to be. 

This was originally billed as a limited series when Netflix bought it, but you’re launching it as a comedy. At what point did you realize there was more room for it?

Wigfield We had a great time making it, so hopefully… 

FISHER I feel like we saw it both ways. It could be a great limited series, but we have ideas if it goes on. It’s a question of whether we can get the whole cast back and we want to see what these guys would do next. I don’t think we would do it ever as an anthology. I think you want to see these particular characters. 

FEY And I think we were encouraged to stay open to it, as well. It is so human in its scale, and I think humans are going to be around for… at least 15 more years. 

A version of this story appeared in the April 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe. Read THR’s cover story with Tina Fey.