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Of all the commentary one might hear about Tina Fey‘s wildly successful career in television, film and on Broadway, a few things are irrefutable — chief among them that with her first sitcom, 30 Rock, she created a series that is TV canon. The awards juggernaut’s blend of self-aware, surreal and deadpan humor, as it followed the eccentric players and producers of a Saturday Night Live-like network show, may not have been for everyone (as the ratings reflected), but it touched a cultural nerve and created a devoted megafan base strong enough to sustain its six-season run on NBC.
After 30 Rock wrapped in 2013, Fey found herself in a Hollywood where women — in particular, funny women — were becoming the town’s most bankable stars; her contemporaries Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy were leading that charge. Rather than compete for the spotlight, Fey channeled her whip-smart comedic instincts behind the camera, putting her energy to work across a head-spinning number of projects. She has co-created or executive-produced seven more sitcoms and written and/or starred in multiple films. She also adapted her script for Mean Girls — the dark high school comedy that has arguably become the definitive comedy for millennials — into a Tony-nominated musical, then scripted a film version of that musical version of her instant-classic original. Fey now has no fewer than nine projects in development over the next few years, and she’ll return to Only Murders in the Building later this year.
