So what inspired Tina Fey to adapt the 1981 film “The Four Seasons” for Netflix? Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield, the latter two of whom worked alongside Fey as writers on “30 Rock,” which came to a close in 2013, sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about what it was like to make the series, and apparently, Fey, who loved the movie as a kid, has been trying to make this happen for quite some time.
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“I was chasing it for a long time, more than five years,” Fey said. “I’d spoken to Alan [Alda] early on, got his blessing to pursue it and I think Universal thought they had the rights and then we all realized … we didn’t. So, it was a process of getting the right people to sign off.”
“We’d been talking about a show the three of us could do together, and Tina had mentioned the movie a couple of times,” Fisher added. “Finally, we were like, ‘OK, we’ll watch the movie!’ Tracey and I were instantly like, ‘This is a great premise for a show.'” (The concept of “The Four Seasons” does work really well as a miniseries, particularly when each of the titular four seasons gets the luxury of two episodes.) As for Wigfield, she felt optimistic when she realized Fey would work behind and in front of the camera for the series. “Knowing Tina would star in this is what excited me because it felt tonally different than anything we’d done before. It’s grounded, it gets into deeper emotional stuff. It’s adult, more true to us, because Lang and I were coming off of high school shows,” Wigfield said; she worked on Netflix’s “Saved By the Bell” reboot, and Fisher was a co-creator of the great “Never Have I Ever.”
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Beyond that, Fey said that the softer, gentler approach of both the overall show and the way they shot it was a huge draw for her: “The appeal for me is that, the older you get, the more you think about the shooting experience. This is just us in comfortable places having a nice time.” Fisher continued that thought, saying, “Right now, people are craving gentleness, and I think that you get that here. Because the world is full of terrors.” Naturally, Fey had to throw in a closing joke, quipping, “Please don’t hold it against us that we had a nice time making this.”
So will “The Four Seasons” continue past season 1? It hasn’t been renewed by Netflix yet, but Fisher thinks it could easily end or continue. “I feel like we saw it both ways,” Fisher said. “It could be a great limited series, but we have ideas if it goes on. It’s a question of whether we can get the whole cast back and we want to see what these guys would do next. I don’t think we would do it ever as an anthology. I think you want to see these particular characters.”
“The Four Seasons” is streaming on Netflix now.