Fey feels ready for prime time on '30 Rock'

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LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y. -- Tina Fey has moved from 30 Rock to 30 Rock.

The former Saturday Night Live head writer, who spent nine years at the late-night show's Rockefeller Center headquarters, is writing and starring in her own sitcom, 30 Rock, which makes its debut Wednesday (8 p.m. ET/PT) on NBC.

Fey, 36, quit her SNL writing and Weekend Update co-hosting gigs to make her foray into prime time.

"Originally, I thought I'd stay and do Update. If I didn't have my daughter (Alice, 1), I might have been foolish enough to attempt that," she says. "But it seemed like it was organically time to be done with SNL."

But she couldn't totally leave the experience behind; the new show is loosely based on her old job. Fey plays Liz Lemon, a writer on the late-night variety series The Girlie Show, when a volatile new star (Tracy Morgan) and mercurial new boss (Alec Baldwin) throw her professional life into disarray.

As for the change in her own professional life, "It's a tremendous amount of hours," she says. "But working toward one goal is delightful."

Another plus: "The weekend is really the weekend."

She gets to spend the time with Alice and husband Jeff Richmond, a composer at SNL. Saturday night is date night for the couple. Fey didn't even watch SNL's season premiere, opting to go to a dinner party.

Heading up a new series is always a challenge, but Fey faces additional pressures with 30 Rock. The show must differentiate itself from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, another look at a late-night variety show on NBC (tonight, 10 ET/PT) that premiered Sept. 18 and has had so-so ratings.

The shows are very different, Fey points out. For one thing, the Aaron Sorkin series is an hour-long drama; Fey's is a 30-minute comedy. "But at the same time, your grandma's going to be confused," she says. "Let's not fool ourselves."

She worries viewers will suffer from late-night fatigue, but "it's beyond my control."

Still, Fey is confronting her intra-network competitor head on, with an ad for the show poking fun at Studio 60. In it, Baldwin mistakenly thinks he's on the show with Amanda Peet, who stars in Studio 60. Fey wrote the promo because "it's ridiculous to not deal with it."

She also initially felt ridiculous about starring in the series. Her deal was to write, but NBC encouraged Fey, who rarely appeared in SNL skits, to play one of the leads. She joked to NBC, "All right, it's your heads!" But, she adds, "once it was Alec and Tracy, of course I wanted to be in it."

Now, Alice visits Fey at Silvercup Studios, where the show tapes. "She looks exactly like my husband. She has enormous blue eyes," Fey says. "We needed a baby to play me in a flashback and wanted to use Alice, but it's bad casting! She doesn't look like me."

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