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Why Great News Could Fill the 30 Rock–Shaped Hole in Your Heart

Robert Carlock and Tracey Wigfield explain the wacky but true story behind their latest workplace sitcom, also produced by Tina Fey.
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NBC

Four factors conspired to bring NBC’s new comedy, Great News, to life. First, Tracey Wigfield got a job as a writers’ assistant on 30 Rock, and was eventually elevated to the writing staff. Secondly, the show was shot at the Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens. Thirdly, Wigfield’s mom, Kathy, lived in Wigfield’s hometown of Wayne, New Jersey, about 40 miles north of the studio. And finally, Kathy visited the set of 30 Rock. A lot.

“If it were Tracey’s episode or Tracey’s birthday or whatever, her mom would come by,” says Robert Carlock, who, along with Tina Fey, executive produced both 30 Rock and Great News. ”She’s this woman who, in the most wonderful mom way, is just perfectly comfortable talking to a grip at great length, or sitting down and talking to Jimmy Marsden for like an hour about some movie he was in, with him trying to help her remember what the movie was for hours until they realized it was a movie he was not in. That’s kind of how she operates.”

Suffice to say, Tracey and Kathy Wigfield are very close. “She has my e-mail password,” Tracey Wigfield says. “It makes her happy if she sees I haven’t checked e-mails in a long time. Then she worries about me, and she sees if I’ve been reading them, then at least I’m alive.”

When Fey and Carlock asked Wigfield to pitch them a series idea, she naturally landed on a mother-daughter workplace comedy. “We were hoping she would come to us with something about her family, about her mom,” says Carlock. “The idea of her mother in the workplace was kind of unavoidable.”

Great News takes place at a fictional cable-news network that operates out of a nondescript office building in Secaucus, New Jersey (the show shoots in Los Angeles). Katie Wendelson (Briga Heelan) is a 30-year-old associate producer on the network’s afternoon show who’s been struggling to get a big story from the show’s producer, Greg Walsh (Adam Campbell). Yearning for a new challenge, her mother, Carol (Andrea Martin), applies to be an intern—and Greg hires her not only to pique Katie, but because Carol is the only person not afraid of the show’s middle-aged anchor, Chuck Pierce (John Michael Higgins).

As you’d expect from Fey, Carlock, and Wigfield—who was a co-executive producer on The Mindy Project after 30 Rock ended—the show is full of rapid-fire funny lines, throwaway jokes, and lots of absurd situations, like when Katie dances to “Here Comes The Hotstepper” on the air to puncture Carol’s stage-mother tendencies. But there’s an unexpected warmth to the show that distinguishes it a bit from other Fey/Carlock shows, which comes mostly from the chemistry between Heelan and Martin. Fey, says Wigfield, was “a big fan of” the latter actress, an SCTV vet perhaps best known for her supporting roles in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Difficult People. “Then when I met [Andrea], she seemed lovely and hilarious,” she continues—”like a little Martin Short in a wig. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be great.’ ”

Fey/Carlock productions have a knack for great casting, whether they’re tapping actors known for comedy or not. Alec Baldwin had done S.N.L. many times before starring on 30 Rock, for instance, but his turn as Jack Donaghy permanently changed the public’s perception of him. If Great News is a success, the same will likely be said about Nicole Richie—who plays the show’s plugged-in, but semi-clueless, co-anchor Portia Scott-Griffith.

“She’s just fearless, and it doesn’t occur to her when she’s in a scene going toe-to-toe with John Michael Higgins, [that he’s] a guy who’s been doing comedy for 30 years, and she isn’t,” says Carlock. “She has just as much comic presence as he does. I hope that people will be delighted and surprised with her performance, [though] I don’t think she is. Part of what she communicates is this confidence that she has.”

Even though sitcoms set at news stations go back to the days when Mary Tyler Moore was tossing her hat in the air, Wigfield felt strongly about setting her series in that world. “It seemed like a high-stakes, exciting place to work. If the show’s about a woman who’s going to have a big career in the city, it needed to be an aspirational job. It’s not as fun if it’s like, ‘I want to be a manager at a shitty bank,’ ” she says. Though the show was written and shot this past fall and won’t follow the real-life news cycle, it will have opportunities to address real-life stories—in its own skewed way. For instance, a season-ending mini-arc involves Katie investigating a hacking scandal that ensnares Portia and other celebrities.

“Especially if we get a second season and are able to shoot things that will air within the same year of being shot, my hope is to be able to do jokes about current events—but also jokes about news and how people consume their news,” she says.

The ensemble also includes S.N.L. vet Horatio Sanz as vulnerable story editor Justin—and Wigfield herself as Beth, a conspiracy-spewing meteorologist whose braided ponytail seems to grow exponentially in each episode. Like her previous bosses, Fey and Kaling, Wigfield is acting while performing the extensive duties of a show-runner. How did she do it?

“I got to be on set a lot, but I could be in the room enough to run every single re-write,” she explains. “I think it made the show better that I was able to put in that much time in the writers’ room.” However, if the show gets another year, Beth may need an escape plan: “If NBC wants 26 episodes next season, maybe Beth goes on a tornado hunt.”