“Great News,” a comedy from the team behind “30 Rock,” starring Briga Heelan as a producer whose mother (Andrea Martin) becomes an intern at the same cable news show, premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday evening on NBC with back-to-back episodes.
“They’re two women who really love each other and are intermeshed with each other in a way people will find really relatable and sweet,” creator Tracey Wigfield told City News Service.
Wigfield said “Great News” “is sort of based on my relationship with my mom” and Martin’s character Carol “is basically just my mom that I stole from my real life.”
Wigfield was a writer on the 2006-13 NBC comedy “30 Rock” and said her mother “would come visit sets a lot. She would hang and sort of embarrass me and never leave and loved being there so much.”
Because comedy often comes from uncomfortable situations and “the more uncomfortable the better,” Wigfield said when she was thinking about creating a show based on her mother she thought “what would be the worst place to have her?”
She quickly realized it would be working in the same office.
Wigfield describes “Great News” as a “hopeful, happy show” about a woman in her 60s starting over after being a stay-at-home mother for 30 years and other characters “who are in places in their life where they are feeling stuck and deciding to go after the life they want.”
Tina Fey, who created and starred in “30 Rock,” is among “Great News”‘ executive producers, along with Robert Carlock, Jack Burditt and David Miner, who were also executive producers on “30 Rock.”
“Where this show and `30 Rock’ share some DNA is that it’s a funny show with a lot of fast-paced jokes per page, but the show is very different,” Wigfield said.
To Fey, “Great News” “is about the relationships.”
“For a series to sustain itself, it does have to be about the people and the relationships,” Fey said during January’s Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour.
John Michael Higgins co-stars as the difficult-to-please anchor of “The Breakdown” and Nicole Richie as a young hip co-anchor who “really wants to report about Snapchat and lipstick and anything kind of pertaining to her,” Richie said.
Fey called Richie, best known for her role on the 2003-2005 Fox alternative series “The Simple Life,” “a really funny person.”
“She has an instant likability,” Fey said. “I think the kind of instincts that she has, you cannot teach them. She has a very easy, good comedy instinct in terms of timing, in terms of scale of performance.”
Higgins describes his character as being “on the downward slope of whatever happened to the news in general … authoritative, paternal, bloviating.”
“I actually have quite a lot of reverence for some of those old bloviating talking heads,” said Higgins, who has appeared in such films as “Best in Show,” “We Bought a Zoo” and “Bad Teacher.”
“There is something distinguished and reassuring about that type of presence … but it is a style of interaction with the public that is fading and our stories deal a lot with the fade.”
The cast also includes Adam Campbell as the dashing young executive producer managing the hosts whims and tantrums and Horatio Sanz as a seen-it- all video editor happy to dole out zen-like advice.
Wigfield portrays the creepy resident meteorologist.
“I love to perform, and it was really kind of exciting that I got to write a part for myself and a part that I think is funny and that I wanted to play,” said Wigfield, who also had a recurring role on the Burditt-produced Fox/Hulu comedy “The Mindy Show” as Dr. Lauren Neustadter, a love interest of Dr. Peter Prentice (Adam Pally).
