Reunited on TV: Tina Fey, Luke Kirby, Walton Goggins on the Joy of a 'Fun Hang'
Part 4 in my week's series: I talk to the stars crafting 'new combinations on the Boggle board' with old pals on-screen and off this season
This week, with Emmy voting fully underway, I’m bringing you a five-part series about the overarching trends I’ve noticed among a lot of this year’s best television shows. TV is a deliberately broad, something-for-everyone medium. Still, there are undeniable connections that emerge each year, revealing what’s on the mind of Hollywood and what it believes the audience might be thinking, too. So far I’ve written about TV billionaires, Los Angeles playing itself, and the cinematographers and directors who stole the show. Today, we’ve got a group of writers and actors who are getting to live the true dream: working with their friends.
Tina Fey has never been married to Will Forte. “But I have probably seen him eat a cold meatball off a table in the middle of the night,” she tells me. “I've probably seen him asleep on a couch. He's probably seen me asleep on a couch. We've probably burped in front of each other.”
That kind of intimacy — the real, sometimes gross, eternally relatable kind of intimacy — is at the backbone of The Four Seasons, the Netflix comedy series in which Fey and Forte play one of four couples who vacation together every few months. The show is adapted from the 1981 film of the same name by Alan Alda, and Fey wanted to capture the original’s sense of celebrity worlds colliding.
“One of the big appeals to me as a kid watching it was, oh my gosh, Alan Alda is married to Carol Burnett! What? That’s crazy,” Fey remembers now of the comedy, which also starred Jack Weston, Sandy Dennis and Rita Moreno alongside Alda and Burnett. “There are all these people that you kind of knew, and you believed them as friends. And so we thought, okay, can we build a similar ensemble?”
The result is a series of onscreen reunions, with former Saturday Night Live co-stars Fey and Forte as a married couple, Fey’s Date Night co-star Steve Carell as their recently divorced friend, and Colman Domingo recruiting his old friend Marco Calvani to play his onscreen husband. The Four Seasons is built on reunions behind the scenes as well. Fey created the show alongside Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher, both of whom were writers on 30 Rock before going on to create their own shows. And before our conversation ends, Fey makes sure to shout out Jeff Richmond, the executive producer, composer, and director of the episode Fey herself wrote. Richmond also happens to be Fey’s real-life husband. Presumably, he’s seen her fall asleep on a couch as well.
Reunions are almost inevitable in Hollywood, a business built around finding the most appealing combinations of people onscreen and then ideally putting them together over and over again for maximum profit. But you can tell when the reunions are really working, as they did on several major Emmy contenders this year, both onscreen and off. Whether it’s an actor and a showrunner coming back together and riffing on the best elements of their previous hits, or two collaborators reuniting and building something totally new, there’s an undeniable joy in seeing two people back in the saddle together again.
Or, as Fey puts it when talking about working with her husband Richmond once again, “Who knew there were new combinations on this Boggle board?”
Tone Poem
The reunion between Fey, Fisher and Wigfield after they’d all gone on to make other TV projects — Fisher created Never Have I Ever, Wigfield created Great News and the reboot of Saved by the Bell, and Fey created The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — was an opportunity to use everything they’d learned since their years together on 30 Rock. It was also a chance to do something completely different.
The goal, Fey says, was to “try to do this kind of experiment in tone shift, in this smaller human scale, writing with less joke density, and see if we can stretch ourselves in this way.” The Four Seasons is more melancholy than any of Fey’s previous comedies, and about far more recognizable, human people. While writing, she credits Fisher for tracking the character arcs, Wigfield for punching up jokes and herself for monitoring the truth behind each story. “It's three grown-ups holding the wheel,” Fey adds.
There’s a similar tonal experiment happening on another Netflix comedy, A Man on the Inside, which stars Ted Danson as a retiree who becomes an unlikely detective and goes undercover at a retirement home. Technically, the show is built around solving a mystery, but it’s also about the melancholy of aging and of grief; creator Mike Schur calls it a Trojan Horse, a show that’s actually about finding community and companionship, even if you sell the audience on the Ted Danson detective saga to get them in the door.
Schur and Danson first worked together on The Good Place, and as Schur tells it, he’s basically been looking for a way to reunite since the moment the series ended in 2020. There’s reason to believe Danson felt the same.
“He likes to say that he was hanging around my office waiting for me to give him another idea,” Schur told me in December. “I think he really loved doing The Good Place because there is this weird thing that happens, which is that you reach a certain age and people stop thinking of you as funny.”
On A Man on the Inside, Danson and Schur do a lot to disprove that, building the comedy not just around Danson as a retiree moonlighting as a detective, but setting the show in a nursing home filled with some of the funniest 70- and 80-year-old working actors out there. One of them, it turns out, had his own reunion with Danson on set.
“John Getz and Ted Danson knew each other in New York in the '70s,” Schur says of the veteran character actor, best known for films like Blood Simple and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, who plays the closest thing the series has to a villain. “They were going in for the same parts.” It turns out it only took 50 years for them to stop competing with each other and actually share a fistfight scene onscreen.
Friends Forever
Once you’ve pulled off an on-screen reunion between two previous collaborators, marketing can be a no-brainer. There’s a reason Fey and Carell are front and center on the poster for The Four Seasons, and why Kristen Bell and Adam Brody have been happy to mention their mostly unseen previous work together while promoting their sparkling chemistry in Nobody Wants This. In one noteworthy case this year, though, the element of surprise was worth it.
There are many reasons that the episode five scene between Walton Goggins and Sam Rockwell, playing two old friends reuniting in a Bangkok hotel, was such a standout part of this season of The White Lotus. But the long, real-life friendship between Goggins and Rockwell surely didn’t hurt. “The very first day on the set, there was a comfort and a level of listening and respect and genuine love and affection for each other that permeates their entire friendship,” Goggins says of the scene, which memorably features a long monologue from Rockwell about his character’s journey of self-discovery in Thailand. “It was really one of the greatest opportunities and privileges to get to go through this experience with Sammy Rock.”
Sometimes a surprise reunion can be hidden in plain sight, tucked behind a more obvious one. On the now-canceled Prime Video series Étoile, Luke Kirby reunites with his Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, this time in the lead role as the head of a New York ballet company. He joked to me that he’d asked them for a role in which he didn’t have to talk too fast, but saw the reunion as a “really charmed” opportunity.
What audiences may not have been anticipating, though, was a delightful episode reunion between Gideon Glick, who plays a supporting role on the series as a choreographer, and his old friend Jonathan Groff, playing his estranged boyfriend. As a New York-set show, it was perhaps inevitable that Étoile would reunite some Broadway royalty, but who could have imagined it would revolve so much around tortillas?
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There are so many more reunions to get into, onscreen and off. ER veterans Noah Wyle and John Wells hadn’t worked consistently together since Wyle stopped being a series regular on the NBC drama in 2005, but the duo made TV magic together once again with HBO Max’s The Pitt. Seth Rogen recruited his Take This Waltz director, Sarah Polley, to play herself for the unforgettable second episode of Apple’s The Studio. Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock, who have been friends for decades and previously collaborated on New Girl, brought their combined experience to craft the impeccable FX dramedy Dying for Sex. Dan Fogelman emailed Sterling K. Brown before he told nearly anyone else that Hulu had picked up his new series Paradise, asking his This Is Us star to play the lead role. I have no way of knowing if Steve Martin and Eugene Levy reminisced about working together on 2005’s Bringing Down the House while making the latest season of Only Murders in the Building, but isn’t it fun to imagine they did?
When you start trying to list all these reunions, you realize how common they are, and with good reason. Given their own TV show to create, what person wouldn’t want to bring in their favorite people to work together? As Fey put it about The Four Seasons, “If I'm going to be in this, I want to really be excited to see every one of these people. We just wanted kind of a fun hang.”
