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Of all the commentary one might hear about Tina Fey‘s wildly successful career in television, film and on Broadway, a few things are irrefutable — chief among them that with her first sitcom, 30 Rock, she created a series that is TV canon. The awards juggernaut’s blend of self-aware, surreal and deadpan humor, as it followed the eccentric players and producers of a Saturday Night Live-like network show, may not have been for everyone (as the ratings reflected), but it touched a cultural nerve and created a devoted megafan base strong enough to sustain its six-season run on NBC.

After 30 Rock wrapped in 2013, Fey found herself in a Hollywood where women — in particular, funny women — were becoming the town’s most bankable stars; her contemporaries Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy were leading that charge. Rather than compete for the spotlight, Fey channeled her whip-smart comedic instincts behind the camera, putting her energy to work across a head-spinning number of projects. She has co-created or executive-produced seven more sitcoms and written and/or starred in multiple films. She also adapted her script for Mean Girls — the dark high school comedy that has arguably become the definitive comedy for millennials — into a Tony-nominated musical, then scripted a film version of that musical version of her instant-classic original. Fey now has no fewer than nine projects in development over the next few years, and she’ll return to Only Murders in the Building later this year.

But Fey’s latest TV series — an adaptation of Alan Alda’s 1981 semi-obscure drama for Netflix — has become her new chosen home. The Four Seasons, which was initially conceived as a one-and-done limited series for the streamer, explores sitcom staples like modern marriage and coupledom, alongside weightier themes of life and death, grief and loss. Alda, who cameos in seasons one and two, populated his decades-old dramedy with Carol Burnett, Rita Moreno and other luminaries; Fey’s cast includes her SNL pal Will Forte as her character’s husband, along with Kerri Kenney, Marco Calvani, Erika Henningsen and Colman Domingo.

“I love the tone of the film, and that’s something we’ve tried to maintain,” Fey explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the show’s season two premiere. “‘Cozy’ is the word that I keep using — and everyone here probably wants a drink every time I say it. It brought together these comedy actors who were already so beloved: Carol Burnett, Alan Alda and Rita Moreno. And there are all these people you already knew. That’s the kind of ensemble I felt like we were able to build with Will and Carrie and Steve and Colman. To just keep that kind of joyful, relaxed watching experience.”

For Fey and the show’s co-creators, Lang Fisher and Tracey Wigfield, writing at length for these characters — whom the longtime showrunner grew to know as the movie became a rewatched favorite — considerably opened up the creative possibilities.

“We thought, ‘If we can expand it, we can see more of Anne, who kind of disappears in the movie,'” she added. “We can go deeper with Ginny, with all these characters, and get a little more time.”

Forte, seated alongside his former SNL colleague and current fictional wife for the joint interview, had a confession. When asked how the show and his character were derived from Alda’s film, he came clean.

“Well… I haven’t seen it,” Forte revealed, visibly red-faced. “I know. I have two young kids, and when we were first doing this, the movie wasn’t on Netflix yet. And then I was like, ‘Your priority is just the frickin’ diapers.’ It feels so disrespectful because I love Alan Alda with all my heart. I’m an ass. I should have already done it. This is the year we watch it!”

Season two of the series picks up where the story left off, following the lives of three long-term couples across four vacations together over the course of one year: Kate and Jack, Nick and Anne, and Danny and Claude. By the end of season one, their cozy dynamic is shattered when Nick (Steve Carell) declares he’s leaving his wife, Anne, and soon takes up with a much younger woman, Ginny. The seismic shift forces everyone in the group to confront uncomfortable truths about their own marriages, aging, friendship and the lives they thought they’d built. Then, in a freak car accident, Nick dies.

For a show rooted equally in comedy and drama, that might seem like a hard right turn into grim territory. But for both performers, it was an opening for some of the most rewarding work they say the medium has to offer.

“Those highly emotionally charged situations are my favorite places for comedy to come from,” Forte said. “There’s the tension, but it also feels grounded. It’s so normal for people to try to say something they think will lighten the mood when something very dark is happening — so it stays grounded, but it’s also such a heightened state that some pretty shocking stuff can come out. Which is pretty fun.”

Fey put it somewhat more succinctly: “Well, honey, my grief is funny.”

The character’s death — and finding a way to write him meaningfully into season two — is one of the challenges Fey says she finds “thrilling.” It’s a far cry from 30 Rock, where laughs-per-minute was a benchmark, or SNL, where wild, idiosyncratic humor and pure experimentation were the currency. Writing and acting in a show with room for dramatic turns — ones that can be treated with both genuine gravitas and grounded humor — has become the logical new frontier for Fey to push her already brilliant career forward.

“Letting something like Nick’s death happen was kind of thrilling,” she said. “When you write episodic TV, especially broadcast episodic back in the day with 22-episode seasons, you really have to prevent too much from happening, because your goal is to run for eleven years. People don’t get married until season seven; they don’t have a baby until season eight. You’re trying to maintain a kind of stasis. So it’s exciting to let these things happen. And now we’re trying to figure out: What’s the right amount that can happen and still feel real? Does it feel like we’re going too fast? It’s more challenging going past season one.”

Going past season one was a quick decision for Netflix, and moving the series into a third season and beyond now seems like a given. The show’s ratings are tracking even better than season one’s — it immediately shot to the top of the streamer’s Most Watched TV in the U.S. chart, which gave season one a 78 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. With 13 critics now weighing in on season two, The Four Seasons is sitting at 85 percent fresh.

Which brings things back to Forte and his long-overdue homework. If the ratings aren’t enough motivation, he has already come up with a new answer for why the film remains unwatched — one that both flatters Alda and reframes the whole thing as a mark of serious craft.

“I came up with a better — different — answer,” Forte interjected with a grin. “It was an acting choice. There’s no way to portray the Jack character exactly the way Alan Alda did it. So I wanted complete freedom. I didn’t want to feel lured into imitation. I didn’t want any of that in the performance.”

Fey, barely suppressing a snicker, observed that he was essentially positioning himself as the Daniel Day-Lewis of the situation.

“Yeah,” Forte replied, deadpan. “And now I’m retiring to fix shoes.”

Seasons one and two of The Four Seasons are out now on Netflix.