A New Queen of Comedy

While filming the first episodes of The Four Seasons — the hit Netflix dramedy she co-created with Tina Fey and Tracey Wigfield — Lang Fisher ’02 confronted a challenge so singular she’s probably the only person in TV history to have faced it. Fisher was in the director’s chair helming a difficult, intimate scene. One of the stars was naked, and Fisher, “of course, took it very seriously and made sure to take the time to shoot it in a way so that everyone felt the most comfortable,” says Wigfield.

But the ultra-compressed shooting schedule also meant the cast and crew were working on Halloween — which is why, just off camera, a crew member stood silently holding a boom mic, dressed head to toe in a hot dog costume. Somehow, Fisher “didn’t even laugh about it once,” marvels Wigfield.

It’s hard to imagine a starker example of the serious discipline it takes to make a seriously funny comedy. But if you’ve laughed at the TV sometime over the last 15 years, there’s a good chance Fisher was involved. As a veteran of the writers’ rooms for 30 Rock, The Mindy Project and Brooklyn Nine-Nine — and the co-creator of the comedies Never Have I Ever and The Four Seasons — Fisher has a long list of professional highlights that she’s happy to talk about. But when asked to winnow it down to a single sentence, she has a quick answer: “I’ve gotten to write for the funniest women out there.”

From childhood, Fisher was drawn to funny women. “I loved Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I loved Strangers with Candy. In high school, I loved Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites. I feel like I always saw myself in those characters,” she says. Still, with the sturdy practicality that comes from being the daughter of two doctors, Fisher entered the College on the pre-med track. “That felt very safe for me,” she says. “But pretty quickly I could tell I was putting in about 50 percent of the effort needed to actually do that as a career.”

Her real passion, she soon discovered, lay elsewhere: “The place where I gave 8,000 percent was my improv group,” she says. Though she had never even heard of improv comedy in high school, she auditioned for the Varsity Show as a first-year. When she was unsuccessful, she spent the subsequent months loyally attending performances and wrapping her head around the intricacies of the form. In her sophomore year, she auditioned again. This time she made it, and spent much of her College life immersed in comedy — including a key role performing alongside actress and comedian Jenny Slate ’04, Tony-winning actor and singer Brandon Victor Dixon ’03, and TV writer and showrunner Gabe Liedman ’04. “It felt like a real Broadway show,” says Fisher, who fondly remembers her character — a onetime child genius who strutted the boards in a NASA spacesuit.

After graduating as an international politics major, Fisher landed a job working with fellow Varsity Show alum Peter Koechley ’03 for The Onion — the satirical newspaper and news program known for both its political bite and its daffy take on the inanities of the news media. It was, perhaps understandably, a very different job during the Obama presidency. “In those days we were doing, you know, ‘Joe Biden is out washing his car in front of the White House’ or ‘Meet the 3-year-old who wrote the latest Fast & Furious movie,’” Fisher says.

Fisher’s first sitcom job was writing for the seventh and final season of NBC’s critically adored 30 Rock, created by and starring Fey. Fisher was acutely aware of her luck in landing the role during the series’ swan song. “When I got the job, I kept being afraid I would be, like, hit by a bus,” she says. “I’d walk through the streets of Brooklyn waiting to be crushed to death.”

Though Fisher, happily, avoided any fatalities en route to her first day, she did need to muster the courage to speak up in a writers’ room full of veterans from shows like Friends, Frasier and Saturday Night Live. “It was very intimidating because it was well known that this was the crème de la crème of comedy writers,” she says.

“I just thought, I want to be good at this. I will work as hard as I can to be as good as the people in this room. I was just praying I was good enough to make this my career. I wasn’t even expecting to get to write an episode.”

Instead she was tapped, along with writer Nina Pedrad ’11, to help craft a happy ending for 30 Rock’s heroine, Liz Lemon. The pair delivered an ideal capper to a long-gestating story, as Liz adopts two children who bear an unmistakable resemblance to Tracy and Jenna, the stars of the show-within-a-show that she has spent the series coddling with an equal mix of frustration and affection. “Seems about right,” says Liz.

“Tina is one of the few examples of when you should meet your heroes,” Fisher says. “She’s very soft spoken, very calm and really has very little ego, even about her pitches. The best joke wins.”

Fisher’s next job, writing for the second season of Mindy Kaling’s sitcom The Mindy Project, was an education in how differently television could be made. Once again, Fisher was working with one of the great female comedy writers of the era — who was also starring in the show. But Kaling’s interest in the zippy, messy rhythms of romantic comedies, in all their fantastical triumphs and demoralizing heartbreaks, marked a notable change from Fey’s wry showbiz satire. “In many ways, [Kaling and Fey are] very similar, and in many ways, they’re very different,” Fisher says. “The main difference is that Mindy was pretty close to my age and single. And everybody in the room was young and single, so we would, like, go on vacation together.” Life, in this case, was imitating art.

The Mindy Project had premiered on Fox as the TV landscape was transitioning from only broadcast to include streaming, and when Fox hit the cancel button after its third season, Hulu was there to pick it up. Fisher was along for the ride. “It was a little uncertain, but kind of exciting,” she says. “There was something really freeing about going to Hulu, where it was: ‘You can say bad words.’ ‘You can make it anywhere between 22 and 32 minutes.’ It just sort of opened up the possibilities.”

The Mindy Project concluded with its sixth season, but Kaling and Fisher weren’t done collaborating. Kaling had published a book of personal essays, which caught the eye of a Netflix executive who suggested she develop a semi-autobiographical Young Mindy show. “Mindy was like, ‘I was pretty boring. I was a nerd,’” Fisher says. “But she was interested in doing a modern YA show, and she knew that I had watched a lot of YA, so she asked if I’d be interested in co-creating something with her.”

The result, Never Have I Ever, follows Devi Vishwakumar, an Indian-American teenager navigating her awkward high school years. It was the logical endpoint of both Kaling and Fisher’s interests. “It really felt like the two of us and who we were in high school,” she says. “For me, not the parts about Indian culture, of course. But I was an overachiever with a big personality who wasn’t necessarily cool or good with boys. [And] I also wasn’t a wallflower. You see a lot of nerdy, shy girl characters who are [thinking], I hope somebody notices me. But I was outgoing and competitive, and I’d get mad if I lost. I think Mindy was like that, too.”

After four well-reviewed seasons, the series ended in 2023 with Devi fulfilling a long-held dream of college at Princeton. While Never Have I Ever wasn’t immediately followed by Never Have I Ever: The College Years, Fisher isn’t closing the door on revisiting Devi later in her life. “I think both Mindy and I would be very interested in doing that,” she says.

In the shorter term, Fisher faced the question inevitably endured by any writer coming off a major success: What’s next? The obvious answer, she realized — more YA! — didn’t interest her. (“Hollywood loves to pigeonhole people,” she says.) What’s more, having spent years successfully illuminating the mind of a teenage girl, Fisher left Never Have I Ever in a very different stage of life than she’d begun it. A self-described “single mom by choice,” she’d had a son during production with a close friend and writer she’d known since The Mindy Project. “It’s very easy, when you’re very ambitious and driven, to not make the choice to have kids,” she says. “And because I was so focused on my career, I was running out of time. So I did it in a unique way, and I’m so glad I did.”

How, then, to best tell a story that could capture the distinct complexities of middle-aged life? The solution came from her old boss Fey, who has long regarded Alan Alda’s 1981 movie The Four Seasons as a personal favorite. The film follows six friends through four group vacations — each set during a different season — as they grapple with the big and small crises, sometimes self-inflicted, that can crop up in middle age. It was, and remains, a great hook, and Fey teamed up with Fisher and Wigfield to adapt the movie’s conceit into a series. “It’s nice to be doing a show that’s a little closer to where I am in life now,” Fisher says.

The Four Seasons follows its own close-knit group with decades of history — played by actors including Fey, Steve Carell, Colman Domingo and Will Forte — as they navigate joy, heartbreak, malaise, death and the other surprises that can interrupt an apparently settled life. “The show is supposed to feel kind of gentle and cozy. A nice, warm blanket in this crazy time that we’re in. But not insubstantial either. Not a pastry puff,” Fisher says.

Because its premise hinges on couples on vacation, The Four Seasons has filmed in such picturesque locations as New York’s Hudson Valley, Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Beach and Trento, in the north of Italy. But the reality, Lang says, is not as glamorous as it might seem. “I’m working 14-hour days, I’m usually a little bit sick, I’m eating, like, loose M&Ms,” she says. After Season 2 ended on a tantalizing note, Netflix quickly ordered a third season, and the show’s creative brain trust got back to work. “We’re writing it right now, and we’re hoping to shoot it this fall,” she says.

In TV, as in life, there are always more stories to tell. And though Fisher stresses that The Four Seasons’ storylines are not drawn directly from real experiences, she agrees that the intimacy between her and her collaborators makes them feel real. “People will reach out and say, ‘This is how I am with my best friends of 20 years,’” she says.

Wigfield describes the show’s unique alchemy in even more personal terms: “I’m not saying this show is my love letter to Lang and Tina and vice versa, but I think a lot of what people respond to is how much we love each other.”

Fisher agrees. “When you have a child and you do this job … it puts everything in perspective,” she says. “The nice thing about making a show with two other moms is that we allow each other to be good moms. We make sure the show is taken care of, but we also care about each other and ourselves.”

Not that the two worlds don’t occasionally cross over. Fisher’s 6-year-old son, Armie, has visited the set. “He’s very funny. One of my main comedy collaborators, currently,” says Fisher. “He doesn’t understand the term ‘showrunner’ yet. But he knows I write.”

Scott Meslow is a senior editor at The Week magazine and the author of the book A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks, which was published in February. He lives in Minneapolis.