Tina Fey on ‘The Four Seasons': ‘It was a challenge to be restrained about where we put jokes'
'Just one more time,' says Tina Fey. 'It was time for me to go back into something just one more time, before they put me in the ground.'
With a string of successes from 30 Rock, Mean Girls, Saturday Night Live to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, turns out it was a 40-year-old movie that inspired the award-winning triple threat to take another creative swing.
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'I've always loved the movie since I was 11 years old,' Fey tells Gold Derby of the 1981 feature The Four Seasons. As luck would have it, the film was made for Universal Studios, where she happens to have an overall deal. More crucially, she also secured the blessing of Alan Alda, who wrote and directed the original, and has a cameo in Fey's limited series adaptation for Netflix. 'I think he's delighted that this movie he made 40 years ago is still speaking to people in these two different ways,' says Fey. 'I'm still so grateful that he trusted us not to screw it up.'
Fey's vision would honor the original by surrounding herself with friends, on-screen and off (she brought on former colleagues Tracy Wigfield and Lang Fisher as co-showrunners). 'The idea of building this ensemble with beloved actors, and the thrill of seeing them pretend to be old friends, that was one of the things I loved the most about the old movie,' says Fey of the film, which also starred Carol Burnett, Rita Moreno, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston, Len Cariou, and Bess Armstrong, about three couples who vacation together.
Steve Carell was her first call. 'I thought if I could get Steve to say yes, then we'd really be on our way somewhere,' she says, 'because he's the closest we have to an Alan Alda.'
'He's our most beloved American comedy figure of a couple generations, probably because of the incredible shelf life of the American Office. I also thought there was something about Steve that he could get away with playing Nick, because Nick does some things that make people mad. Michael Scott [from The Office] does things that are ill-advised, too, and Steve is beloved, so I knew he could do that.'
SEE Tina Fey, Steve Carell, and more on the 'once-in-a-lifetime' experience of filming 'The Four Seasons'
Next in line was Colman Domingo to play Danny. 'He was the only person we ever talked about for Danny,' she says. 'I didn't know what we were going to do if he didn't want to do it.' She hoped he'd want to do some comedy after Rustin — and especially The Madness. 'It was a lot of running and getting shot at, and you know, we're the same age, so maybe he wanted to do a show where he could wear sweaters and go to the beach.' Domingo suggested Marco Calvani as his partner, Claude (adapted from the original's Claudia); Will Forte, Kerry Kenney-Silver and Erika Henningsen rounded out the ensemble.
Naturally, Fey was always going to play Kate. 'TikTok will tell you that I only ever play people named Kate,' jokes Fey. 'I always loved the scenes between Carol and Alan [in the film], the way that they would argue, and the kind of healthy arguing style that they had. I just wanted to be in those scenes.'
That said, she did check in with her co-showrunners to make sure the fighting didn't go too far. 'Am I just being a horrible bitch to [Jack] all the time?' she asked them, who assured her she wasn't. 'I have heard anecdotally from a lot of people who feel like they see their marriage reflected in Jack and Kate.'
Getting the voice of the show just right was a priority — especially after the sharp-edged, deeply sardonic wit of 30 Rock.
'It was a really conscious effort to work in a different tone,' Fey says. 'We wanted to evoke the tone of the original movie. At the same time, we knew we were doing eight episodes for streaming, so we felt like we needed just enough story energy to feel like we were cliff-hangering and pulling people one episode to the next. It was a challenge for all of us to be restrained about where we put jokes. The few other characters we meet can't be too absurd. We have to stay grounded, stay tethered. And that's the goal — if we were to strip some things away, would we be able to hold tinier emotional moments and small behaviors as subtler jokes.'
And all joking aside, the series does take a dark turn in the penultimate episode, when Carell's character, Nick, dies in a car accident. 'It was one of the things we talked about from the beginning, because we thought, something needs to happen, and what's a real-life thing that happens?' she says. 'And that's one of the things that happens.'
'I remember when we pitched it to Steve, he was like, why does this keep happening to me?' says Fey. 'And I was like, 'Oh no! Well, too late — it's happening again.''
Netflix
Fey says the episode, which is inspired by thirtysomething, is ultimately one of her favorites. 'It's probably the biggest swing that we take in the whole season,' she says. That it happens off-screen, she says, is because 'that's the way it happens in real-life… You don't expect it, and you don't see it.'
SEE'The Four Seasons' co-creators explain their decision to kill [spoiler] — and Tina Fey's remarkable performance in response: 'She's really good'
Though Fey juggles her usual trifecta of roles – showrunner, writer, actor – on this series, the shorter episode run meant that the scripts were finished by the time shooting began, so the pivot was more seamless. 'You are pretty much ready to answer questions that the actors might have, because you've been thinking about it for a long time,' she says. 'And I guess one of the important things to remember on the acting side is to maybe then try to shake yourself loose from how you've been hearing it in your head the whole time, to try to actually be present with the other actors, because then you might find something new that surprises you.'
That's another one of the benefits of the streaming world, Fey acknowledges. 'You don't have to cut to exactly 21:15 so you end up like speeding your episode to make the exact timing. Nobody puts a snipe for a singing contest over your show,' she says. 'Plus we did so much nudity,' she jokes.
This also marked the first time that Fey's husband, Jeff Richmond, directed an episode she'd written. 'I think there were moments where he was so happy to get to direct the play within the episode, because he's a theater director also, and that was probably the closest we came to butting heads,' she jokes. 'I will say it was even more adorable thing to watch Jeff direct, his first three-way, same-sex love scene. That was a new fun challenge, because we didn't have those kind of scenes on 30 Rock.'
But she's not ready to take on that role herself just yet. 'I would never say never,' she says. 'But I love the showrunner position, because you can have all the perks and the input that a director has without having to figure out the shots. I really do respect people who think in pictures. But I definitely think in moments and bits and words and characters more than pictures.'
Far more challenging was shooting the seasons themselves — finding locations for four seasons of the year in just nine weeks of shooting time. Luckily, they had a road map: Arlene Alda, Alan's wife, was the set photographer of the original film. 'She put out a coffee table book at the time of how they did it and what order they shot things in,' says Fey. That meant Forte and Carell were able to get in some ski time. 'They always seemed happiest when we had them do sports; though Fey, however, didn't enjoy that it quite as much. 'This is horrible, why do people do this? It's so cold!' she laments.
The ultimate reward, for her, is the success of the show, which debuted at No. 1 on Netflix. 'The closest for me would be playing Sarah Palin,' she says. 'I don't think I've ever worked on something that was seen by so many people. You can always tell anecdotally when you hear from a bunch of people that first weekend. Not to name drop, but I think the first person that texted me that weekend to say I watched it and I loved it so much was Lindsay Lohan. And I was like, if Lindsay Lohan is watching this in Dubai, people are watching it around the world.'
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