As Indiewire reports, Great News creator Tracey Wigfield spoke at the Television Critics Association yesterday, and detailed Tina Fey’s upcoming 7-episode guest starring arc on the series. (Fey’s presence on the show — beyond serving as an executive producer — was first announced in May.)
Fey, Wigfield describes, will be playing Diana St. Tropez, a “sort of Sheryl Sandberg on steroids [who] knows exactly how to have it all.” She’s the new boss over at the cable news show The Breakdown, on which the series’ protagonist Katie, played by Briga Heelan, works as a producer. (And, to her dismay, where her mother, played by Andrea Martin — who incidentally is also a hilarious TV mom on Difficult People — now works as an intern.) Fey’s character recently wrote a book titled Boss Bitch, which Indiewire notes mirrors Fey’s own memoir, Bossy Pants, and which is one of the many qualities that beguiles Katie.
If you happened to see last year’s film Christine, you’ve already recently seen an unsettling (based on a true story) plot about a news channel who decides to focus on rage and violence in order to up ratings — and it sounds like Great News, obviously in a much lighter fashion, will similarly take on the uncomfortable relationship between successful news and turmoil. Wigfield says of Fey’s character:
She comes in and has this big attitude of, ‘The show is old-fashioned, and we need to make it relevant to cable news right now in 2017. Unfortunately, cable news in 2017 is kind of a dumpster fire of people screaming at each other, sort of an echo chamber of rage. She’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we want to do.’… She kind of takes Katie under her wing and gives her advice that Katie sort of takes the wrong way throughout certain episodes.
Apparently they’ll be shooting Fey’s episodes starting next week, readying for the second season’s premiere on September 28 on NBC. Read our review of the first season here.