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One of the main pleasures of Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later — after all the Hand that Rocks the Cradle references and the story of Chris Pine’s band and Beth’s rich-lady clothes — was in seeing Elizabeth Banks returning to the role of Lindsay, who we see now ten years after the events of the movie has become a local TV news reporter doing puff pieces all over the city. It meant we got to see what’s increasingly become one of the most reliable pleasures in comedy: Elizabeth Banks playing an ultra-professional lady TV news anchor.
If you remember from Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, Banks’s relatively nondescript character from the film was given a secret backstory as a Never Been Kissed-style undercover reporter sent to deliver an exposé on camp counselors. So naturally, Ten Years Later ups the ante and has Lindsay working as a roving TV news reporter. She’s not happy, of course. She wants to do hard news and is instead stuck reporting on puppies and the like. But as the season goes on, she gets a lead on the big, blockbuster story that’s going to serve as the show’s climax, involving a bunch of nuclear weapons and ex-presidents.
The actual mechanics of the plot aren’t what’s important here. What’s important is that this was yet another reminder that we’re in the Golden Age of Elizabeth Banks News Anchor roles. It’s a type she perfected while on 30 Rock, playing Avery Jessup, the CNBC anchor who ends up falling for Jack Donaghy. Avery is a merciless Republican with a strict sense of fiscal Darwinism, and her news reporter persona has all the harsh, blonde authority of your average Fox News anchor. Her first appearance on 30 Rock is in the episode “Anna Howard Shaw Day,” where Avery has Jack as a guest panelist on her show “The Hot Box.”
Banks already had the look, the cadence, and the attitude down perfectly. She even managed to have fun with it when Avery gets kidnapped by North Korea and is forced to read propaganda news.
Avery Jessup was one of 30 Rock‘s best characters, mostly because of Banks’s commitment to making her tight grasp of control on every aspect of her life into something fresh and funny every time. Ever since 30 Rock ended, it’s been a rare pleasure to get to have News Anchor Elizabeth Banks back in our lives. The Pitch Perfect movies don’t completely scratch that itch; there, Banks plays a commentator on the various a cappella championship tournaments, along with John Michael Higgins, and while she’s not delivering the news with the exact same clipped intensity, it’s her pulled-together, former-pageant-queen poise that gets us pretty close. The same goes for Walk of Shame, which finds Banks balancing the prim and proper news anchor she aspires to be, with the accidental party girl she’s mistaken for after a night (and day) of debauchery.
And now with Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later, we’ve got the real thing again. Banks has perfected the type. She should probably just travel with that same blonde anchor wig in a case, in case she ever wants to post up and deliver a news report on a moment’s notice. None of this is to say that Banks isn’t a wonderfully diverse actress, but credit must be given for the work she’s put into making Intense, Driven News Lady as much her own as Gregory Peck made Wise, Decent Lawyer his own. We’re all better for it.
