Happy Birthday Tina Fey, Please Write Another Movie

Dear Tina Fey,

Hello! How are you? How is your family? How are your nine Primetime Emmy Awards? Well-polished and glistening, I hope?

I’m writing, first of all, to wish you a happy birthday. I hope you’ll forgive me for doing so, but I looked up your age on Wikipedia and saw that you’re turning 49 today. That’s amazing! You’re definitely way younger than I’ll be when I finally win my nine Emmys, three Golden Globes, five Screen Actors Guild Awards, seven Writers Guild of America Awards, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. (Yeah, I’m on Wikipedia again.)

I am also writing because I am hoping you could do me a favor. Think of it as a reverse birthday present, if you will: I will give you exactly nothing, and you give me a gift catered to my personal tastes. After all, you are a public figure that I like, and therefore you owe it to me to do exactly as I say.

Here’s what I want, Tina Fey: I want you to write another movie. You’re really good at it, and it’s been 15 years since Mean Girls—and I know that because I wrote the acclaimed listicle 15 Underrated ‘Mean Girls’ Quotes That Are Just as Good as ‘Glen Coco’ for the anniversary last month—and as much as I love rewatching Mean Girls, I really think it’s time. C’mon. Just do it. Please? It’s a movie! How long could it take? Two hours? That’s how long it takes me to watch a movie, so I assume that’s how long it takes to write one? You’re Tina Fey! You can crank out another cult classic, no problem!

Don’t get me wrong, Tina Fey. I love your work as a creator and executive producer of high-quality comedic television. Saturday Night Live has never been better than when you were head writer. I’ve read the 30 Rock pilot more times than I can count. The first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is my favorite first season of any show, ever. Great News deserved better, and I am prepared to physically fight NBC for canceling it (after all you did for that network!) if that would make you happy. You are a badass TV boss, and you always will be.

But I have a confession to make: I never finished 30 Rock. Or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Or even, for that matter, Great News. The truth is, Tina Fey, I am an insufferable millennial. I’m addicted to my phone. Twitter and Instagram have killed my attention span. Why should I watch your TV show when I can catch all the best jokes in GIF-form later?  We youngsters are all about that binge-life, baby, but we’re also very tired. At the end of a long day, the idea of starting a whole damn show sounds like far too steep of a commitment. I’d rather get married.

Then there’s the fact that, Tina Fey, your characters are weird and ridiculous and over-the-top and I love them so much—but after three seasons of inevitable escalation, they can also be a tad… much? As much as I love Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess), when he starts filming a pilot about a cape salesman with a weirdly game Greg Kinnear, I start to lose all sense of reality and meaning. But you know what the solution to all of these things is? Movies!

Mean Girls is a masterpiece. I can (and do) rewatch that entire story from start to finish in a cool 97 minutes, and never once feel guilty about abandoning it before your intentions were fully realized. There’s no need to worry about say, Damian, becoming a detached parody of himself, because there is simply not enough time for that to happen. Coming from my totally unbiased position as the senior film reporter for a website that mostly covers television, I think TV is out and movies are in. And frankly, it’s kinda nuts that you wrote one extremely good, incredibly successful, culture-shifting film 15 years ago and then never went back to the medium! Whose fault is this? The executives? Your agent? The Patriarchy??? I will beat them up for you!

Now, I know you’re probably busy, Tina Fey. But also… are you that busy? Great News was canceled. Kimmy Schmidt, pending that interactive choose-your-own-adventure special, is over. Mean Girls on Broadway was a fun idea, but it feels like it’s time to let that legacy lie and move onto your next big hit. A quick look-see at your IMDbPro page (that’s right, sometimes I use IMDb Pro instead of Wikipedia!) reveals you are, in fact, writing a film for Disney called “Untitled Witchcraft Project.” A quick Google search reveals you have been working on said untitled witchcraft project since 2014. To that I say: Disney! Let’s get going on that untitled witchcraft project! Did I miss that on your schedule of ten Avatars, twenty Star Wars and fifty princess live-action remakes you have coming up? Tina Fey is out here existing as one of the greatest screenwriters of our generation with just one film under her belt! That is a tragedy.

Elizabeth Stamatina Fey, I hope you spend your birthday relaxing and taking some much-deserved you-time. And I hope you spend the day after your birthday working on that movie for me. That’s right, me, the random blogger who’s never met you and can’t possibly fathom the nuances of your life, but feels comfortable weighing in on your career choices anyhow. Happy birthday!

Stream Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix

Stream Great News on Netflix

Where to stream Mean Girls