Listening in: Tina Fey explains MILF Island and why the writers strike would make for a bummer plotline (Audio)
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- March
- 28
I confront a particular dilemma while blogging about 30 Rock: Tina Fey and Co. say a lot of things in their prime time slot that I could never print in this space.
Season One’s “The C Word” was a good example. “MILF Island,” the April 10 return, is another. I’m not telling you what any of the initials in those last two sentences stands for. (Well, OK, M stands for Mom, but that’s it!)
In her hour-long conference call with reporters earlier this week (read this and this to get up to speed), Fey discussed the politically incorrect (cough…understatement) episode, which centers on the fictional NBC’s highly lucrative reality show about an island of young boys and attractive mothers.
Click the audio button to hear Fey explain it herself, because she has more job security than I do…
On the upcoming episode, MILF Island
Meanwhile, don’t expect any of the upcoming episodes to be about the TGS writers hitting the picket lines.
While she figures viewers are as happy for the show to be back on the air as the cast and crew are to be back at work, Fey said the recent writers strike was too much of a bummer to turn into a storyline.
There may be something like that sometime down the road, but it’ll be a step removed from the 100-day WGA work stoppage that scuttled a chunk of this season.
Here she addresses the question…
On whether there’s any plan to incorporate the writers strike into an episode
By the way, the strike didn’t nix any planned guest stars, so they got lucky that way, she said.
Fey said she mostly stayed home with her daughter Alice during the strike, calling that a blessing, like the maternity leave she didn’t really have before. The flip side of that was the strike ending and having to say goodbye to her daughter every day.
“Well we’re back to work. It’s tough now that my daughter is old enough to say ‘You not go to work. You not go outside.’ So it’s hard for any working parent.”
She likes to bring daughter to the set, but it’s a busy work place and she’s mindful that not everyone else can do that. She said there are special days on set when everyone can bring their kids in, like at Halloween, and they’re planning another one soon.
“It always brightens my day to have her around,” Fey said of her daughter.
Before the strike, two scripts were already being outlined, she said.
So they went back to those mid-season stories and retooled them as the premiere episodes of the upcoming mini-season. There’s less of a crunch now, she said, because the short season puts the light at the end of the tunnel closer than it would be in the middle of a full season.
“I don’t know if these episodes will feel different,” she said. “I almost hope that they don’t. Because our whole staff scattered right at the beginning of the strike, because many of our staffers live in California, we didn’t really have a chance to sit down as a group and sort of hash out how the season has gone. We actually probably will do that after these five, we’ll do a big post mortem of what we liked what we didn’t like. The strike was strange. Everybody sort of went home immediately, and we didn’t really see each other until we came back.”
Meanwhile, Fey talked about the possibility of shooting an episode in front of a live audience, something they don’t do now in the single-camera approach. Here she talks about a show castmembers staged to raise money by crew members hurting from the strike. That gig turned her on to how great a little audience reaction could be.
This entry was posted
on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 10:30 am by Brian Howard.
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