Everybody ♥ Tina Fey

This has been a good month for Tina Fey, her sitcom has hit 100 episodes Thursday night , and she had her memoir ‘Bossy Pants’ released which has been met with glowing affirmative reviews.She also broke the news on Oprah of her expecting her second child with husband Jeff Richmond .The timing seems perfect as 30 Rock airs its season finale in May and she is due in September.

She is a darling of the critics .And Tina Fey's high profile can be credited to a great extent to the success of Liz Lemon, the main character in 30 Rock, which she created and stars in. 30 Rock for 5 years now has remained quirky, cerebral, fresh, original with great comic acting, weird in a good sense of manner and side-splittingly funny. Even an average episode is twice as funny as other network sitcoms. Tina Fey plays Liz Lemon as an unorganised dishevelled geek dealing with life in a studio at NBC's 30 Rockefeller Plaza as the lead writer of a late-night comedy show-‘TGS with Tracy Jordan’. Liz Lemon leads a hectic lifestyle and finds herself both succeeding and usually failing due to her crazy writing staff, personally involved boss Jack Donaghy and so called celebrities as stars of the show.

The trials and tribulations of Lemon is fun because Fey plays her with such likable goofiness, warmth, vulnerability and self deprecation. Lemon's insecurities, combined with her independent New-York third wave, college educated feminist persona make her role model for many modern women. Her humour like her surname Lemon is acerbic. Episodes are well thought out with continuous punchlines and rants which each character in the show gets in proportionate measure. Her inspirations come from anywhere, mostly through observation. Fey has previously credited her 5 year old daughter Alice with inspiring some of Liz Lemon's most memorable lines, such as, ‘I want to go to there.’ Further she excels in social commentary and barbs can be directed at anyone, just about anyone.

She had a huge cultural impact in 2008 owing to her satirical portrayal of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a series of guest appearances on Saturday Night Live. One hopes that one resembles a movie star to get famous by doing an impression of them .Nobody waits around for a female politician to crop up who looks like themselves. But Fey’s career rocketed after that impression on Saturday Night Live ,closely followed by Emmy win that year. Fey made such a caricature of Sarah Palin, feeding on her obvious lack of nous for the job she was campaigning for that she dented her whole campaign of the Republican Party .

It’s difficult to know who is real and who is the impersonator, if you don’t know about either one of them. Quite uncannily, much of Fey’s Liz Lemon on 30 Rock is similar to herself in real life. Lemon and Fey are intimately bound up with each other. After all, Fey was lead writer on Saturday Night Live from 1999 to 2006 and is a successful woman in a man's world of comedy television.

30 Rock bears more than a passing resemblance to Saturday Night Live. They often address the problems of being a woman in the comic world, usually in funny and surreal ways. Lemon’s rants sometimes take a charmingly naïve philosophical note, like her world view 'All of human kind has one thing in common. The sandwich. I believe that all anyone really wants in this life is to sit in peace and eat a sandwich.' Watch the clip here.

Certain sections critique her for being on the cover of fashion magazines which are seen to perpetuate photoshop myths hence culprit to the objectification of women. I say, not true...she is not reed thin. In fact anything but, she has got curves because of her pear shaped body structure.

And while it is true that she might not have that successful if she were not attractive, it also unfair for the world to expect her to stand for feminity. She is doing her job and an outstanding one at that. That is a statement in itself. And then if she goes on to be on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar or Cosmopolitan or Esquire, it is just an occupational perk for being good at what you do and it shouldn’t matter.

I don’t have a life size crush on Fey, but she is an inspiration. Television writing is not easy and its serious business. Its remarkable how in the west the television is controlled by the writers. They do wield enough clout and power. And in that Fey has successfully ran a show and managed to build herself as a brand now which is why she is respected. Even her critics are her fans. And hence I ♥ Tina Fey, Everybody ♥ Tina Fey.