Tina Fey gets honest about realities of marriage to Jeff Richmond — and how it inspired new Netflix show

Tina Fey is getting candid about the highs and lows of marriage, with help from her new Netflix show.

The Saturday Night alum has been married to composer Jeff Richmond since 2001, seven years after they started dating after meeting at the famed Chicago improvisational theatre troupe Second City, where she started her career and where he was musical director.

The Mean Girls director has now taken lessons from her own marriage and the writing of Alan Alda’s 1981 comedy The Four Seasons for a new version of the film, a Netflix series, which sees the decades-long friendship between three married couples get tested when one divorces, complicating their tradition of quarterly weekend getaways.

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In an interview published in HELLO! Magazine, Tina first shared: “We talked about the show being a love letter to long-term relationships, both platonic and romantic.”

Giving her two cents on marriage, particularly long-term marriage in your 50s, she said: “Your life is ideally more than just the person you’re married to. Sometimes, when you’re struggling with something with just your spouse, you need a group of friends to bring humour to it.”

“Those friendships really help marriages, I think. Having a person who fulfills a part of you that your spouse can’t quite fulfill, is important,” she emphasized.

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The Four Seasons, of which Tina and her husband are executive producers as well as Alan, follows six old friends who reunite for a relaxing weekend away, only to learn that one of the couples is about to split up. 

As the three sets of partners — portrayed by Tina and Will Forte, Steve Carell and Kerri Kenney-Silver, and Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani — go on four vacations over the course of a year, viewers see how the shake-up brings issues, old and new, bubbling to the surface.

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It’s not hard for Tina to write candidly, and not overly romantically, about marriage. “Seriously, once you’re married, you stop even celebrating Valentine’s Day. Maybe I’m bitter, but I think that’s strictly amateur night,” she joked.

Tina, who is a mom to daughters Alice, 19, and Penelope, 13, also spoke to HELLO! about the perks of having achieved much of her fame later in life, in her 30s. “Having become a public figure later in life than most has helped me deal with the aspects of intrusion into my private life.”

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“People do treat you differently, so it’s nice to come into it a little bit older, because you know not to believe it 100 percent.”

“The beauty of impostor syndrome is that you vacillate between extreme egomania and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m a fraud! Oh God, they’re on to me!'” she also shared.