Fey, the name in fame

At the end of last Thursday’s special midweek edition of “Saturday Night Live,” Tina Fey came onto the Weekend Update set to make a plea for viewers to watch “30 Rock” when it returned to the Thursday 9:30 p.m. timeslot this week. There was only one problem: Fey wasn’t mic’ed at the time, and so her plug depended on lip-reading, mime and, eventually, Update anchor Seth Meyers repeating Fey’s words so the TV audience could understand her.

It was like a bizarre sequel to one of the oldest “SNL” running gags, News For the Hard of Hearing, and also the latest example of how badly NBC has bungled Fey’s fame explosion.

When NBC originally planned for “30 Rock” to premiere at the end of October, it was so they could capitalize on the election with these primetime “SNL” specials. And that makes sense: “SNL” always does better in election years, and this election has elicited more advance interest than any in decades. But the plan should have changed once John McCain chose Fey doppleganger Sarah Palin to be his running mate, and, especially, once the first of Fey’s five note-perfect Palin impersonations brought down the house – and, potentially, the Republican ticket.

(Not since Richard Nixon humanized himself by asking, “Sock it to me?” on “Laugh-In” in 1968 has a single line on a sketch comedy show had as much of an impact on a presidential election as Fey, in her Palin-as-Marge Gunderson voice, cheerfully exclaiming, “I can see Russia from my house!”)

Rather than cashing in on Feymania – which also included the second consecutive best comedy Emmy win for “30 Rock,” on a night when Fey delivered three very funny, memorable acceptance speeches – NBC stuck to the original plan … and stuck to it … and stuck to it. The “SNL” specials deserved to stay on the schedule, but they could have bumped the premiere of the heinous “Kath & Kim” for a few weeks, so that Fey’s regular project got attention before viewers tired of this side gig.

Ah, well. “30 Rock” was always going to have a tough road to becoming anything more than a cult success – comedies that take place in the world of show business, even if they’re not really about showbiz, are always a hard sell – but NBC’s short-sightedness only made it tougher.

And even if the Palin sketches fail to bring a Soviet-sized crowd of new viewers to “30 Rock,” they at least helped make clear that the Tina Fey of 2008 is just as talented a comic actress as she is a writer.

We all knew Fey was great with a keyboard, and she had definitely developed a rapport with the camera during her stint as a Weekend Update co-anchor. But in the earliest days of “30 Rock,” Fey seemed willing, even eager, to play a straight woman. Fey’s Liz Lemon, harried producer of an “SNL”-like sketch comedy show, often said funny things, but mostly she was there to react to the larger-than-life antics of Alec Baldwin as entitled GE executive Jack Donaghy or Tracy Morgan as reality-challenged actor Tracy Jordan.

But as the series moved along, Fey’s confidence as a performer grew, to the point where Baldwin would sometimes be her straight man. (Morgan, not so much, but that’s OK; if Tracy Jordan were normal for more than 30 seconds, the show’s universe would collapse in on itself.) Fey was at the center of some of the funniest moments of season two – Liz weeping in front of Jerry Seinfeld in a way that sounded like she was imitating him, Liz enjoying a brief stint as a power-suited NBC executive a little too much – and the start of season three makes it clear that she’s no longer content to hide her acting light under a bushel.

Thursday’s season premiere has Liz trying to impress an adoption agency inspector (guest star Megan Mullally) because she desperately wants a baby “so it’ll grow up and resent me.” Her process involves removing all the Colin Firth movies from her apartment (“in case they consider them erotica”), threatening the staff of her show to behave and ordering the set designers to make the green room look like a nursery. It’s Liz in full-on panic mode, and the more frantic her alter ego gets, the funnier Fey is.

The premiere has to spend too much time cleaning up last year’s cliffhanger mess, as Jack has to resort to extreme measures to get his job back after a stint in Washington. Not only are some of the machinations labored, but the premiere doesn’t even address the development from the season two finale where Jack was exposed to a “gay bomb” – or, for that matter, Kenneth the page (Jack McBrayer) being shot in China so organ thieves could harvest a kidney. If they were going to ignore some of the finale, they might as well have skipped past all of it.

But Fey’s parts of the premiere are terrific, and next week’s episode is an even better – and sillier – showcase for her. Flying to and from Chicago for a day trip, Liz reluctantly accepts illegal sleep medication from Jack that’s known to cause “dizziness, sexual nightmares and sleep crime,” and realizes to her delight and dismay that Oprah Winfrey has sat down next to her just as the pills are kicking in.

Winfrey was an obsession of Fey’s back on “SNL” (one sketch featured Oprah’s audience dismembering each other in their enthusiasm over being in the studio for “Oprah’s Favorite Things”), and here she’s a very good sport as “30 Rock” goes to town on Oprah as religious phenomenon. Upon meeting her, Liz begins confessing every bad thing she’s ever done in her life (“I eat emotionally, and one time at summer camp I kissed a girl on a dare and then she drowned”) and later the other women at the office flock to Liz and hang on her ever word like she just got back from an audience with the pope.

(Also, Fey plays drugged-out and incoherent very well, shutting down a phone call by explaining, “I’m’a call you back! I snitting next to Borpoh!”)

In one of those three Emmy acceptance speeches, Fey talked about how she prefers to be thought of as a writer than as an actress. Unfortunately for her – but fortunately for those of us who get to enjoy the funniest show on television – she’s getting to be just as brilliant in both roles.