Dream Team Reunite: Tina Fey & Tracy Morgan to Collaborate Again on NBC Comedy
“Here’s some advice I wish I would’ve got when I was your age. Live every week like it’s Shark Week.”
This was one of the immortal lessons delivered by Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) on Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s 30 Rock, a show now firmly situated in the firmament of great comedy series. Do you have a friend—or friends—who still regularly quote from 30 Rock? Re-watching Fey and Carlock’s consistently hilarious NBC comedy is shocking for two reasons: 1) How absolutely chock-a-block each and every episode is with jokes that land, and 2) How perfect a vehicle it was for the many talented people in both its main cast, recurring roles, and cameos. Fey, Jack McBrayer, Alec Baldwin, Jane Krakowski, Scott Adsit, Sherri Shepherd, Judah Friedlander, and Keith Powell to namecheck some of the main cast. Chris Parnell, Rachel Dratch, Salma Hayek, Dean Winters to call out some of the recurring characters. The cameos were legendary—Carrie Fisher, Matt Damon, Peter Dinklage, Jon Hamm, Elaine Stritch, Steve Buscemi, Steve Martin, and Isabella Rossellini are included. But if you had to choose one performer who fit the mold most perfectly, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Tracy Morgan. As Tracy Jordan, the reckless, ribald star of 30 Rock‘s SNL-like sketch-comedy show TGS With Tracy Jordan, Morgan had found a home for his matchless physical comedy and brilliant line readings.
That was a long wind-up to the news delivered in the headline of this article—Morgan and Fey are reuniting for a single-camera comedy pilot at NBC, written by Sam Means (30 Rock, Girls5Eva) and Carlock (30 Rock), where he’ll play a disgraced former football player trying to rehabilitate his image. Morgan will executive produce alongside Fey, Carlock, and Means. This is NBC’s first pilot order of the season.
Director Rhys Thomas (Saturday Night Live) will direct and executive produce the pilot—it is currently untitled—for Universal Television. While the pilot is the first that NBC has ordered this season, they’ve got several shows in development and have renewed two of their four comedies, St. Denis Medical and the Reba McEntire-led Happy’s Place. The future of Night Court and Lopez vs. Lopez has yet to be announced.
Morgan has another show in the works, he’s starring in CBS’s Crutch, a spinoff of their series The Neighborhood, which will run on Paramount+. If the NBC pilot gets picked up for a series, he’ll be able to star in both shows.
While this isn’t quite the 30 Rock spinoff series that fans have been dreaming for, it’s still exciting to hear that Morgan will once again get a chance to star in a show from 30 Rock‘s braintrust. What Tracy Jordan said is true of Tracy Morgan, and will once again be on display in the new pilot: “My genius is alive, like toys when your back is turned.”
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Featured image: NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 06: Tracy Morgan performs onstage during the 17th Annual Stand Up For Heroes Benefit presented by Bob Woodruff Foundation and NY Comedy Festival at David Geffen Hall on November 06, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Bob Woodruff Foundation)
