Creator Tina Fey on Nick’s Death, Ginny’s Pregnancy

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 1 of “The Four Seasons,” now streaming on Netflix.

“The Four Seasons” — the new Netflix dramedy created by Tina Fey, Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher — is about a group of close friends, and how one year in their lives tests them, pulling them apart and then bringing them back together. Based on the 1981 movie written and directed by Alan Alda, who also co-starred, the series has brought Fey back to series television for her first regular role since “30 Rock.” When she was a tween, Fey watched the movie, she tells Variety, “many times” after it came out “in the early days of cable, when they would have three movies in rotation.” Back then, she says, “The Four Seasons” gave her the feeling of, “‘This is what grown up life should be like’ — and it always stuck with me.”

When Fey and frequent collaborators (and former “30 Rock” writers) Wigfield and Fisher were looking for something to do together, Fisher says, “Tina kept mentioning the film as an example of something that might be right for us.” They wanted a project that was “maybe a little more grounded, a little more emotional,” Fisher says. When she and Wigfield finally watched “The Four Seasons,” they realized they should just update the film itself into a series. They acquired the rights, and Alda is a producer on the show (and has a cameo as well).

The movie “The Four Seasons,” a box office success in its day, revolves around three couples, and the trips they take together throughout a single year. The stability in the lives of Jack (Alda) and Kate (Carol Burnett) and Danny (Jack Weston) and Claudia (Rita Moreno) is knocked off its axis when their good friends Nick (Len Cariou) and Anne (Sandy Dennis) divorce. Nick then suddenly begins bringing his younger girlfriend, Ginny (Bess Armstrong), on their couples’ trips, and though they try to hate her for Anne’s sake, by the end of the movie, Ginny has become a part of the family — and will expand it further, because she’s pregnant.

“I think what appealed to me about it was the tone, the ensemble,” Fey says. “And to me as a kid, it was so thrilling to see Alan Alda married to Carol Burnett, which now would be considered creepy fan fiction.”

The show’s eight-episode first season — each seasonal trip is two episodes — largely replicates the movie’s structure, with some key tweaks. In spring, we meet Jack (Will Forte) and Kate (Fey), who pick up Danny (Colman Domingo) and his husband Claude (Marco Calvani) on their way to a lake house owned by Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver). There, Nick tells Jack and Danny that he’s going to leave Anne, who, cluelessly, has planned a surprise vow renewal to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. By the time we see the group for their summer trip to an eco-lodge in Puerto Rico, Nick has replaced Anne with girlfriend Ginny (Erika Henningsen).

Kenney-Silver’s Anne isn’t as easily dispensed with on the show as she was in the movie, though, in which Dennis’ character faded from their lives: This Anne remains in the core group. And after Nick dies in the penultimate episode in a car accident while on a ski trip with Ginny and her millennial friends — in a shocking twist that differs from the movie — the ending of the finale shows that perhaps Anne and the pregnant Ginny might be able to forge their own kind of modern family.

Speaking with Variety, Fey, Fisher and Wigfield discuss their approach to adapting Alda’s movie — what they wanted to keep, and what they changed. They also delve into why they made one of the couples gay men, what they’d want to do in a second season and how the show is meant to illustrate that everyone needs a friend group — “to get you through your life, and to witness your life,” as Fisher puts it.

Oh, and they broke the news that the original movie, which hasn’t really entered the streaming era, is coming to Netflix on May 5!

You killed Nick! Was that a foundational idea?

Tina Fey: Ladies, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we did decide that pretty early in our discussion of what a season could be. We talked very early on about, OK, well, if everything’s human scale, what happens in life is that it happens. And because we wanted to do a full eight episodes, we felt like we needed just a little more story engine than the movie.

Tracey Wigfield: And so much of this show is about middle age, and this group of friends seeing each other through the best times — and the worst. And it just felt like if you wanted to tell a full story in a journey of a group of friends, losing one of them and having to lean on each other through the grief of that, felt like a correct ending. But now, it’s a big regret!

Did you decide to kill Nick before you cast Steve Carell or after? Did he know he was signing up for one season?

Fey: When we pitched it to Steve, we already had that shape, right?

Wigfield: Yeah. Because we went to Steve first — obviously, we had Tina, but he was the first person we thought of for Nick.

The movie also ends with Ginny being pregnant, but obviously it’s very different here, since Nick is dead. Ginny and Anne have bonded in the finale, coming together in grief. Is that something that you would want to explore further in a potential second season?

Fey: If we were lucky enough to do more, I think we would definitely explore that, because that kid would be coming into a family — that kid would be Julia Lester’s half-sister. I mean, Alan did a beautiful job of writing the women characters in the movie, but now that we have more time, we’ve definitely all talked about wanting to spend a little more time with Anne and see where she goes after the divorce. Because, I mean, I love Sandy Dennis’ exit in the movie, saying like, “Fuck it. Tell Nick I bought a snake,” but —

They don’t really stay friends with her.

Fey: They don’t stay friends with her! And that, sometimes in life, is how it goes.

The idea of what family can be in 2025 is very different from what it was in 1981. Was that on your minds with the Anne and Ginny accord at the end of the season?

Fey: We wanted Anne to not just hate Ginny — I think that would’ve been reductive for her.

Lang Fisher: It helps in Anne’s journey, because I feel like what we want to make sure that we honor all sides of this rift, and that it is complicated when your close friends get a divorce. We’ve all had friends get a divorce. We wanted to make sure it felt complicated and nuanced, the way it is in real life.

I will say in revisiting the movie, hearing Jack say to Nick, “Pregnant? You’re 43 years old. You’re going to start having babies now?” was a real slap in the face.

Wigfield: In the theater last night — because we went and saw it with Alan there, and it was so special — it got a laugh. It was like, “Oh, my God, he’s 43? I thought he was 59!”

Fey: I know, we’re all fully 10 years older than the cast in the original movie.

Thank you for aging the characters up. Seriously.

Fey: Well,I had no choice.

Wigfield: I think, just culturally even, what was 43 then is 53 now. I had a baby last year.

Fisher:  All three of us have had babies basically at that age.

Fey: And we’re exhausted.

Yes, it’s tiring. What are some key beats from the movie that you knew you wanted to hit?

Fey: There’s just a line in passing of Kate saying to Jack, “Why are they breaking up? Can’t they just fight it out?” A friend of mine who also loves the movie had said to me, “I hope you keep that.”

Wigfield: That scene, Tina, you kept talking about in the beginning, where they’re listening to the friends having sex — and Carol Burnett and Alan Alda are so genuinely laughing. You can tell they actually think it’s so funny trying not to pay attention to them having sex, and it’s so uncomfortable.

It also feels like one of those you have to be married to know it moments, where you’re with your spouse and you’re laughing over something to the point of tears, and you just can’t stop. One of those weird moments that are so lovely about being married to someone for a long time.

Fey: The getting ice scene too, we wanted to keep: When the men are injured and they’re getting ice and for themselves, and Ginny comes out. And I think it’s sort of nice now that it’s Colman and Will, because Colman’s character’s gay, obviously, and it’s not that he’s sexually leering at Ginny, it’s more about them both being like, “I wish I had a young naive partner who would just do whatever I said!”

Yes, Danny and Claudia have evolved into Danny and Claude, even though Claude does get to yell, “I’m Italian!” as Rita Moreno once did —

Fey: We were so happy because we were like, “Wait a minute, he really is Italian! Oh my God!”

I can totally imagine why you wanted to change one of the couples to two gay men, but can you tell me who that you wanted those characters to be in their new iteration?

Fey: Well, we definitely wanted to change it, because I think it’s just an accurate reflection of all of our real-life friend groups.

Wigfield: Because the movie is just two hours long, you don’t get to spend so much time inside their relationship: He’s really a hypochondriac, and she’s Italian. So, when we were talking about Danny and Claude, we always had Colman in mind from the very beginning — he is the guy with the career, and he knows how to dress, and he has great style and taste, and he’s so funny, and the life of the party.

How we wrote it initially is his husband is a little bit of a drip. And we wrote it a little differently than it ended up on the screen, that he is a stay-at-home husband, and he’s very much a caretaker of him. when we had kind of a different guy in mind. A guy that was a little bit out of step, and doesn’t share a sense of humor with the rest of the group. And then when Marco came in to read, it was this completely different thing that we hadn’t imagined. It was exciting to rewrite the character then for Marco.

I loved the Danny-Kate friendship also. Can you talk about creating that?

Fisher: We wanted this really to feel like a real group of friends, and there are people within groups of friends who are closer than others. These two have been friends since college, and we love that probably Kate had a crush on him in college, and he was like, “Hey, I’m not into you, or anyone like you — I like men.”

All of us have these really close gay male friends that we’ve grown up with, and who have seen us through all of our weird styles, and weird moments in our lives — and vice versa. It’s just a very intimate friendship that we wanted to portray on screen. And it’s nice, because I think the whole point of the show is to show that you can’t just have a spouse — you need a friend group to get you through your life, and to witness your life, and to be there for you. So I love how clearly close those two are.

And it also brings out a little bit of a toxic part of Kate also. It seems like she is choosing Danny over Jack at certain points.

Fey: Yeah. And I think in Kate’s mind, she thinks if it weren’t for their orientation, she and Danny are perfect for each other — but actually, it wouldn’t be good. What Claude brings to Danny, and she sort of realizes this in Episode 7, “Oh, right — this deeply loving, warm, non-judgmental person is what Danny needs.” And in sort of a flip from the original, too, Carol is calling out Alan for being jealous of Nick. In this version, Jack is calling out Kate —being like, “Actually, it’s you. You wish you could do whatever you want. You want to be hanging with anybody but me.”

Nick’s daughter Lila’s (Julia Lester) play is incredible. She gets her anger out about Nick divorcing Anne, and his new relationship with Ginny — in front of all of them at parents’ weekend.

Fisher: That’s a Tina Fey special.

Wigfield: We had nothing to do with it. Emails would go on about the play, and it was just Tina and Jeff [Richmond] going back and forth. And we’re like, “Yeah, we’ll do other stuff.”

How did you decide what you wanted Lila to be saying about Ginny and her dad?

Fey: I love the dynamic with the daughter in the original movie — she just won’t give him anything. I thought that was funny, and we could expand on that. And then of course, the amateur college playwright in me was locked and loaded with a really, really C+ play. Julia is such a good actress, and is a theater actress. It was really fun for us to all come in and just watch them do the play. I think Colman was just delighted that day, just like, “What fun to watch this nonsense.”

You mentioned the getting ice scene from the movie, which is pretty much verbatim on the show. And there’s Kate saying, “I’m a middle-aged woman with dry skin,” which I think about all the time, by the way. In the writers’ room, were you writing toward lines or scenes from the movie? Or were you creating a scene, and then realizing that a certain line would work there?

Fisher: When we were building out the bigger arc of the season, I feel like we would talk about the tent poles from the movie that we enjoyed. We really liked that fight between Carol Burnett and Alan Alda when she’s just brushing her hair so hard.

Wigfield: We knew we wanted a fight, and that we knew we wanted that line. But what they fight about is very different than what they fought about in the movie.

Fisher: Even the “I’m Italian!” — we didn’t cast him because he was Italian. We cast him, and then later on when we were writing that fight, we were like, “Oh my God, he can say ‘I’m Italian!’”

Fey: And I remember thinking about, OK, how do we cast and write Ginny? We talked a lot about what Bess Armstrong does that’s so beautiful in the movie, and the way she’s written is she has a high EQ. She’s a good person, she’s a smart person. She does belong. She’s not a bimbo, she’s not a gold digger — we didn’t want to sell her out for jokes. We were very mindful of extrapolating from what we saw Alan do, and Bess do with Ginny, to thread that through. In the casting of Erika Henningsen — since she’s got this wholesomeness and this intelligence to her — I hope you’re never disgusted that she’s with Nick.

Erika Henningsen played Cady in the stage version of “Mean Girls,” and you’ve worked with Will Forte and a number of people you’ve cast in other things. Do you feel like you have a troupe?

Fey: I did bring her up. When you find someone that you work with that’s wonderful and smart, of course you want to work with them again. I do sort of like to repeat. And you should write that I’m “exactly like Martin’s Scorsese…”

This will be a Q&A, so it will, in fact, be that!

Fey: When we were reading Ginnys, I said, “Oh, we should have Erika come in,” and I was real thrilled that our casting directors already knew who she was. And then we read a lot of wonderful actresses. Some of whom were great, but they were just a smidge younger, and I was like, “That’ll be gross.” So it was like we tried to be really careful with it. And then I was delighted that without putting my thumb on the scale, Erika won fair and square.

But conversely, with Kerri Kenney-Silver, I can’t believe that we didn’t know each other before this, because we were certainly ‘90s New York comedy-adjacent to each other. But she read, and just owned the part from that first time she read. She was incredible.

I wanted to ask you about the Alan Alda cameo — he plays Anne’s father at the ill-timed vow renewal she throws for Nick.

Wigfield: We wanted him to do a cameo, and we wanted him to do the thing that he does so well, and people love seeing him do, which is expound on what it’s like to be married and to be human, and give a little speech about it. We started from the speech, and then there were different iterations where he’s coming in, and then he’s like, “Oh, I’m just a drifter from down the road.” But I think very quickly we were like, “Oh, it could be Anne’s dad, and then he could be at the wedding.”

Fey: I think we wanted to make it clear like he’s not from movie, because it was hurting our brains.

Did you try to get Rita Moreno or Carol Burnett for cameos?

Fey: We didn’t, only because I wouldn’t be comfortable calling those guys being like, “We have no budget left. Do you want to come do a favor?” I would want to treat them like absolute queens, and I didn’t have the money to even consider it.

Let’s hope for a second season. Speaking of which — not that this is a guarantee in this day and age — but I know there is a writers’ room for potential Season 2. When you think about moving beyond the footprint of the movie, where do you want to take these characters?

Fey: We’re going to start talking next week, the three of us. We’ll see.

Are you locked into the “four seasons” structure?

Wigfield: I think so. I think you want these folks. I don’t think you want to add a million people, and start going off and hanging out with Danny’s cousin — although maybe, I don’t know!

The hotter friend group!

Fey: We should see the hotter friend group.

Wigfield: No, we should do an episode in Mykonos with the hotter friend group. And then we can all go to Greece.

I think the heart of our show is this group of friends, and obviously there will be a little bit of a change in that. There’s no Nick, and Ginny’s pulled in whatever way that she is. But I think I’m looking forward to the opportunity to look at these couples and what we had them go through in the first season, and think about in relationships that are so long, what is the next thing that you’re going through? And what are more things that kind of can throw your relationship for a loop in bad and good ways?

Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you want to mention?

Fey: Look at this burrito that I had the restraint to not bite one time.

Fisher: It’s just sitting there haunting you.

Hey, do you know why the movie doesn’t stream anywhere?

Fey: Ah! The movie is going to return to Netflix [on May 5].

Oh my God! I asked them about that.

Fey: We said it last night at the Paris Theater, so I think we’re allowed to say it.

Thanks for this. And I’m still laughing at Kate saying, “I missed my epidural window because I wouldn’t take my pants off.” I felt like Liz Lemon jumped onto my screen.

Fey: [Fist pumps]Whatever it takes!

This interview has been edited and condensed.