When “30 Rock” premiered on NBC in 2006, it was inadvertently pitted in competition with Aaron Sorkin’s hotly anticipated series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Not everyone thought “30 Rock” would survive the battle against Sorkin’s follow up to “The West Wing,” but “30 Rock” triumphed in this head-to-head clash to become one of NBC’s most celebrated comedies. Surprisingly, Tina Fey’s original pitch for the series would have produced an entirely different show, which would just so happen to tread similar ground as an entirely different Sorkin series — “The Newsroom.”
In a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, Fey revealed that her initial sitcom idea would have seen her playing the producer of a cable news program with Alec Baldwin as a stand-in for curmudgeonly right- wing blowhard Bill O’Reilly. Fey described this pitch as being “not unlike ‘The Newsroom’ on HBO,” in which Sorkin tasked his cast of fictional reporters with covering the breaking headlines of last year.
NBC executive Kevin Reilly passed on this idea, convincing Fey to explore a subject closer to home: her time working at “Saturday Night Live.” And thus, “30 Rock” was born, precisely by doing the thing Liz Lemon never could — admitting a network TV executive had a good idea.
Fey’s initial pitch for 30 Rock could have been sort of like Weekend Update
Little is known about Tina Fey’s first “30 Rock” pitch but comparing it to “The Newsroom” implies that it would have involved Fey’s producer and on-screen talent, played by Alec Baldwin, satirically covering the news of the day, albeit with a more humorous angle than HBO’s political drama.
This pitch seems like a natural extension of Fey’s work behind the Weekend Update desk at “Saturday Night Live,”delivering the same acerbic commentary on politics that made her Sarah Palin impression a point of national discourse. Instead, “30 Rock” turned into a live-action cartoon more indebted to family comedieslike “The Simpsons” than politically minded satires such as “South Park” — and we are all better off for it. Fey, for her part, agrees, telling Rolling Stone if they had tried to move forward with her original idea, she would have “drowned trying to keep up with the subject matter.”
