Tina Fey became the first woman to run the Saturday Night Live writers' room
In 1999 Lorne Michaels asked a young Chicago improviser to take over as head writer of Saturday Night Live. Tina Fey became the first woman in that job, then stepped in front of the camera on Weekend Update, and later turned her backstage life into the Emmy-laden sitcom 30 Rock.
Fey grew up in Upper Darby Township, Pennsylvania, where she was born on May 18, 1970. Her mother was born in Piraeus, Greece; her father, a Korean War veteran, wrote grant proposals that raised some 500 million dollars for schools, hospitals and public agencies. The family stayed up for The Honeymooners and Monty Python, and Fey counts Catherine O'Hara of Second City Television as a role model. At high school she secretly wrote a satirical newspaper column, and she later took a drama degree at the University of Virginia in 1992.
Chicago was the apprenticeship. She answered phones at an Evanston YMCA by day and took Second City classes at night, meeting pianist Jeff Richmond, later her husband, and Amy Poehler along the way. In 1997 head writer Adam McKay asked for her scripts, and she moved to New York to write for SNL. She admits she struggled at first. When McKay stepped down in 1999, Michaels offered her his post.
Michaels also paired her with Jimmy Fallon behind the Weekend Update desk in 2000, a pairing he considered a gamble. Critics liked her barbed, carefully built jokes, and Dennis Miller suggested she might be the best anchor the segment ever had. After Fallon left in May 2004, Fey brought in Poehler, making it the first all-female Update team. By the time she departed after the 2005 to 2006 season she had anchored 117 episodes, then a record.
30 Rock began life as a cable news sitcom that NBC turned down in 2002. Reworked around an SNL-like show, it aired in October 2006 and finished third in its slot, yet won Outstanding Comedy Series three years running and closed with 112 Emmy nominations. Fey has since written the memoir Bossypants, a five-week bestseller, and adapted Mean Girls for Broadway in 2018. In 2020 she apologised for 30 Rock episodes featuring blackface, which were pulled from streaming.
Source: Tina Fey
