How Tina Fey Wrote the Most Realistic—and Optimistic—Marriage on TV

Aragones / Netflix Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Long before the term heteropessimism was coined, Tina Fey made the sentiment a staple of her comedy on “30 Rock.” Her quasi-autobiographical heroine, Liz Lemon, was the chronically single head writer of a “Saturday Night Live”-like sketch show, and a woman who rarely minded being overworked and undersexed. Liz’s disastrous dates—and the ways men disappoint in general—proved an inexhaustible well to draw from, so much so that later seasons revolved around the possibility that she might settle down with a boyfriend she found intolerable just to avoid meeting any more new people. Liz eventually parlayed this well-earned misandry into a book (and an aborted TV pilot) called “Dealbreakers,” which was predicated on the assumption that pretty much all of its female readers should immediately dump their male partners. Even as a little girl, she rarely fantasized about a traditional happy ending: one flashback shows her play-acting her wedding, introducing a stuffed animal as her husband, Saul Rosenbear, who’s accompanied by “his son, Richard, from a previous marriage.”

“30 Rock” premièred in 2006, just as big-budget romantic comedies starring the likes of Kate Hudson and Katherine Heigl were on their last gasps. Over the course of the series’ seven-season run, women’s humor, especially on the internet, followed in Fey’s cynical footsteps. The twenty-tens gave rise to mugs labelled “male tears” and Reductress headlines like “How to Break Your Promotion to Your Man Without Emasculating Him.” The heteropessimist cloud that Fey helped usher in has become the prevailing climate. In some circles, having a boyfriend has gone from a status symbol to a source of embarrassment. The widening political divide between young women and men has made the search for love an even more fraught endeavor. There are now more unattached women in the country than married ones. Given the choice between a lacklustre man and no man at all, straight women are leaning toward the latter—a fate even the romance-resistant Liz Lemon saw as tantamount to giving up. Television has taken the hint, with the small screen increasingly populated by dysfunctional unions (“DTF St. Louis,” the second season of “Beef”) and husbands who are scornful, menacing, or both (“All Her Fault,” “Imperfect Women”).

You might expect Fey to feel vindicated by the shift. But tellingly, in the final season of “30 Rock,” Liz did get married—to a sweet, daintily handsome soon-to-be househusband named Criss, played by the rom-com stalwart James Marsden. Their dynamic—she, tetchy and sharp-tongued; he, innocent and sentimental—is strikingly similar to that of the couple played by Fey and Will Forte in her new Netflix series, “The Four Seasons.” Fey stars as Kate, a self-described “scary boss” at the height of her (unspecified) career; Forte’s Jack is a teacher who’s so softhearted he avoids going to craft fairs, lest he disappoint the venders by not purchasing their wares. Thus, even as Fey’s influence reverberates in the gender wars du jour, she herself has turned to a more hopeful counternarrative: a portrait of an emotionally grounded romance that captures both the rewards of a successful, decades-long marriage and the challenges of maintaining one.