Comedy writer and comedy star Tina Fey was born in Upper Darby Township, Pennsylvania in 1970 and grew up a comedy nerd, watching everything from Marx Brothers films to Mel Brooks films to Monty Python to Saturday Night Live. She even cited SCTV star Catherine O’Hara as a role model.

In addition to being the co-editor of her school newspaper she anonymously wrote the satirical column, and as an adult she studied playwriting and acting at the University of Virginia where she majored in drama before graduating in 1992. It was after college that Fey moved to Chicago and took improv classes at both ImprovOlympic and Second City.

Saturday Night Live head writer Adam McKay actually asked Tina Fey to contribute her writing skills to the show, which led to a meeting with Lorne Michaels and her hiring as a writer on SNL in 1997. Like most up-and-coming SNL writers she had to find her footing and figure out her voice, but that began happening pretty soon after she showed her skills parodying things like ABC morning talk show The View, which was a consistently funny recurring sketch. Lorne even offered Fey the job as head writer once Adam McKay stepped down in 1999, and Tina Fey was the head writer of SNL until 2006.

Fey was promoted to cast member in 2000, when she joined Weekend Update as co-anchor with Jimmy Fallon. She got positive reviews and is still seen today as one of Weekend Update’s funniest anchors in the show’s history, often contrasting a dark sense of humor with a sunny demeanor to hilarious results. Her tenure as a co-anchor with Amy Poehler starting in 2004 was reviewed even more positively thanks to Fey and Poehler’s chemistry. Fey also received credit during her time as head writer for injecting SNL with a new life that differentiated the show from its incarnation in the nineties. Even though she would leave SNL after 2006, she would return to the show frequently, including during John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign when she impersonated Alaska governor Sarah Palin to huge laughter.

During her years on SNL, Tina Fey found success on film when she wrote and starred in the teen comedy Mean Girls (2004) based on the 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman. The film told the story of a teenage girl (Lindsay Lohan) who crosses paths with a popular high school clique (“the Plastics”) whose leader is played by Rachel McAdams and who Lohan teams up with the other high school outcasts to exact revenge upon. The highly lauded comedy would end up being such a success that it led to a stage musical adaptation in 2017.

Aside from the 2024 film adaptation of the Mean Girls musical, Fey has not written another film, but she continues to perform in them occasionally, including the romantic comedy Baby Mama (2008) co-starring Amy Poehler, Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson’s fantasy comedy The Invention of Lying (2009), Shawn Levy’s rom-com Date Night (2010) opposite Steve Carell, DreamWorks Animation’s Megamind (2010), the Disney musical Muppets Most Wanted (2014), the Paula Pell-penned Tina Fey and Amy Poehler comedy Sisters (2015), the Amy Poehler-directed Netflix comedy Wine Country (2019), Pixar’s Soul (2020) and Kenneth Branagh’s mystery film A Haunting in Venice (2023) based on Agatha Christie’s 1969 detective novel Hallowe’en Party. Plus she produced and starred in the lukewarmly received biographical war film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016).

For the most part, Tina Fey stuck to television when it came to writing. After Mean Girls, Fey pitched a sitcom that took place behind the scenes of a cable news company to NBC, but NBC rejected the idea until Fey reworked the concept as a behind-the-scenes look at an SNL-like variety show. That sitcom was picked up by NBC for the 2005-06 TV season with backing by executive producer Lorne Michaels and was called 30 Rock.

Set at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City (where SNL is actually filmed in real life) the series mostly revolved around Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) who is the head writer of a variety series called TGS with Tracy Jordan, a fictional variety show that airs on Friday nights and was originally aimed at women with the title “The Girlie Show” until Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) joined the cast and changed the target audience to men. The second character 30 Rock revolves around the most is Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) the NBC network executive. The dynamic between Liz and Jack kind of has Mary Tyler Moore and Ed Asner vibes (some even see 30 Rock as a modern-day Mary Tyler Moore Show) and their clash in personalities was a great source for much of the show’s humor.

In addition to Fey, Baldwin, and Tracy Morgan’s unpredictable and demanding TV star Tracy Jordan, the series also starred Jane Krakowski as Tracy’s narcissistic TGS co-star Jenna, Jack McBrayer as NBC page Kenneth, Scott Adsit as the show’s producer Pete and Judah Friedlander as the show’s sarcastic trucker hat-wearing writer Frank. The series ran on NBC for seven seasons from 2006 to 2013 and despite a struggle in the ratings, it was regularly acclaimed by critics and regarded as one of the best TV shows ever made for its clever satire of the world of network television and its zany but sharp sense of humor. In fact Fey received awards from the Emmys, Golden Globes and SAG for her work on that show and the show itself won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series two years in a row.

Two years after 30 Rock ended, Tina Fey and her frequent collaborator and 30 Rock co-developer Robert Carlock (Carlock was a writer on SNL at the same time as Tina Fey) co-created a new sitcom originally developed for NBC but instead picked up by Netflix called Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2019 and starred Ellie Kemper as a doomsday cult survivor named Kimmy who moves to New York City to restart her life. The show co-starred Titus Burgess, Carol Kane and Jane Krakowski and just like 30 Rock it regularly received good reviews and Emmy nominations, including one for Outstanding Comedy Series for each of its four seasons. The series even has a similar comedic style to 30 Rock (Tina Fey had a recurring role in this series as an alcoholic psychiatrist).

During Kimmy‘s run, Tina Fey wrote for and executive produced 30 Rock writer Tracey Wigfield’s positively received but short-lasting newsroom comedy Great News (2017-18, NBC) starring Briga Heelan as a segment producer of news program The Breakdown and Andrea Martin as her mother/new intern (Tina Fey had a recurring role on this show as a network head). Fey also teamed up with Carlock to co-create Mr. Mayor (2021-22, NBC), which starred Ted Danson as a wealthy businessman who runs for mayor of Los Angeles and struggles to prove himself worthy of the job. That series received more mixed reviews, but both Great News and Mr. Mayor only lasted two seasons.

Tina Fey also executive produced Girls5eva (2021-24, Peacock/Netflix) a musical comedy series created by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt writer Meredith Scardino about a 1990s girl group who gets together years later to make a comeback. The series starred Sara Bareilles (the “chill one”), Busy Phillips (the “hot one”), Paula Pell (the “always working one”) and Renée Elise Goldsberry (the “fierce one”) and while it was criminally ignored by streaming audiences, it had received consistently good reviews during its two seasons on Peacock and third season on Netflix (Tina Fey had a guest appearance in one episode of this show playing Dolly Parton in a fantasy sequence).

Robert Carlock and 30 Rock writer Sam Means would team up to create the post-apocalyptic animated sitcom Mulligan for Netflix with Tina Fey as its executive producer. It featured the voice of Nat Faxon as the newly dubbed “president of the human race” as well as the voices of Chrissy Teigen, Tina Fey, Sam Richardson, Dana Carvey and Phil LaMarr, although it was poorly received, little seen and quickly cancelled after a short run from 2023 to 2024.

More entertaining was the Netflix series The Four Seasons, an adaptation of Alan Alda’s 1981 comedy of the same name co-created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield in 2025 that starred Tina Fey and Will Forte as a married couple alongside Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Marco Calvani and Erika Henningson. The show divided its first eight episodes across the span of four seasons, beginning with spring and ending in winter. The reviews are mostly positive, but it’s more conventional compared to the witty comedies that Fey became known for.

Ever since her time on SNL Tina Fey has proven to be one of the smartest comedy writers out there. Her years in sketch comedy and on sitcoms like 30 Rock has made her popular among comedy fans for her sardonic wit and deadpan delivery, and as a bonus she helped subvert the idea of what women in comedy were allowed to do and be, while serving as an inspiration for other similarly self-deprecating writers-turned-TV stars like Mindy Kaling and Lena Dunham. Meanwhile SNL creator Lorne Michaels has praised Tina Fey and her comedy for being intelligent and edgy, which also happen to be my favorite things about her.