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

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.

The Netflix dramedy is a departure from Fey’s typically zany, joke-packed style, as well as her first remake of a preëxisting property: a 1981 film by Alan Alda that was one of her favorite childhood movies. Like the film, the TV series, which she created with fellow “30 Rock” alums Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, follows a trio of well-heeled couples who are close enough to travel together every few months—and enmeshed enough that when one of the couples, Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), split up, the remaining pairs spin out. Jack and Kate start contemplating their own divorce, while the more sexually adventurous Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani) get into a blowout fight in the middle of a vacation threesome.

“The Four Seasons” is in many respects an overly tidy, milquetoast entertainment. The picturesque locations and slew of comedy veterans involved made me think of Adam Sandler’s M.O. of choosing projects based on where he wants to hang out with his buddies during the shoot. (Fey has attributed her swerve from her usual “hard comedy” to a desire to make the sort of gentler shows she prefers to watch these days.) The characters are disappointingly genial, as inoffensive as the obligatory Vivaldi soundtrack: though we hear plenty about Kate’s alleged acerbity—Danny, her best friend, dubs her “Lady Disdain”—we don’t see much evidence of it onscreen. But we gain something else from Fey turning her keen observational eye, long used to skewer show-biz types, to the subject of relationships in midlife. The treatment feels refreshingly rooted in reality. Multiple story lines in the first season are fuelled by the fear that one spouse is aging faster than the other, whether physically or psychologically—an underexplored but undoubtedly common anxiety among couples approaching retirement age. The second season, which débuted late last month, is set in the aftermath of one character’s sudden death. Kate, for her part, frets that her grieving husband is lacking male companionship. When a fellow Gen X dude approaches Jack on the Jersey shore to play paddleball, she’s practically giddy at the sight. “I didn’t think middle-aged straight men could make new friends,” she marvels.