PASADENA, Calif. — Tina Fey: mother, actress, comedian, female role model, TV producer, writer, Vanity Fair cover model, eight-time Emmy winner, recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, co-host of Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards — and, now, the latest reason to unplug the cable and stream Netflix.
Fey’s new sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, starring The Office’s Ellie Kemper as a single woman who escapes a doomsday cult and starts a new life on her own in New York City, debuts Mar. 6 on the same streaming service that has made cult hits of Emmy-nominated dramedies such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.
Fey was both circumspect and philosophical as she appeared recently before the winter meeting of the Television Critics Association.
Netflix, which allows viewers to watch entire seasons of new series as they’re released, isn’t so much a TV game-changer as it is a good fit for a comedy Fey always knew would be a tough sell on a more traditional broadcast network.
On a day when the world was rocked by the shooting rampage at the offices of the Paris-based satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, Fey was in a philosophical and quietly defiant frame of mind as a reporter from the U.S. public radio service, NPR, asked her about satirical comedy’s place in a wired, intimately connected global community. Fey was head writer of the satirical sketch-comedy program Saturday Night Live for seven years, starting in 1999, and was SNL’s first female head writer.
“Obviously, what happened in Paris is terrible and tragic and upsetting, and when you look at that, or if you look even at the controversy surrounding The Interview, it makes you remember how important free speech is and how it absolutely must be defended,” Fey said, struggling to not make it sound like an empty platitude. “We cannot back down on free speech in any way. It’s one issue on which, we all have to stand absolutely firm.”
Fey said she encountered occasional blowback during her years as the co-anchor and writer of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update segments, but in a much lesser way.
Producer and co-writer Tina Fey speaks about The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt during the Netflix TCA Press Tour in Pasadena, Calif.
“That was a different era, though. In a social-media era like today, when you make a joke on American TV, it can go worldwide in an instant. It’s a different environment. But that doesn’t make it any less vital. We have to be able to do it, even if it’s just dumb jokes in The Interview. We have the right to make dumb jokes.”
Streaming services such as Netflix allow viewers to watch as many episodes of a program as have been made, at a time of their choosing. That is why Netflix has proven popular with viewers living a hurried, densely packed lifestyle full of daily commitments.
Asked how she chooses to watch TV at home, Fey acknowledged that as a working mother, she finds that Netflix provides the ideal viewing solution — even for someone who grew up in live TV.
“I do binge-watch,” Fey said. “I do. I’m on, like, the third season of Breaking Bad, personally, on Netflix. It’s really good. You should watch it.
“I do binge-watch mostly now, because I have young children.”
Fey said TV is multi-faceted, though, with many different ways of watching, depending on one’s need and desire at the time.
“For something like Peter Pan Live!, I’ll have a party of 20 people over, because I’m excited that there’s a live TV show going on. I think the future will be a mix. There’s still an immediacy to live TV. People still get that communal feeling when they watch something live. Even with Netflix. When something like Orange Is the New Black goes up, people watch it all at once. They want to talk about it. They want to email about it. You still get that communal feeling of, we want to see this and talk about it right now. It’s just not literally at that specific one hour of the night.”
Broadcast TV is not dead yet, Fey said.
“You have Modern Family. You have all the Chuck Lorre shows. I don’t know what the secret is, I really don’t. Thankfully, it’s not my job to figure out what works on broadcast TV. I guess it should have been.”
Fey would not rule out a return to traditional network TV at some point.
“I would be thrilled to do another show for broadcast in the future.”
For now, though, she’s embracing the Netflix way.
“It’s a little like that year Howard Stern went from regular radio to Sirius, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, now he can say whatever he wants.’
“So we’re going to have a lot of strippers.”
