Liz Lemon

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Liz Lemon
Liz Lemon.
First appearance	"Pilot"
Statistics
Gender	Female
Age	30s
Occupation	Staff Writer on TGS
Portrayed by	Tina Fey
Created by	Tina Fey

Elizabeth "Liz" Lemon is a fictional character played by Tina Fey on the American television series 30 Rock.

[edit] Personal history

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Liz is the head writer for The Girlie Show, and she has dreamed of writing comedy her entire life. This dream is interrupted when Jack Donaghy is hired as the new network president. He fires Pete Hornberger, Liz's trusted producer, and makes her hire unpredictable actor Tracy Jordan as the show's new star. Liz manages to convince Jack to re-hire Pete, but she can't seem to stop Tracy's influence on the show. After Tracy is hired, the show is renamed TGS Starring Tracy Jordan.

Liz was dating Dennis Duffy, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, until the episode "The Break Up," in which she learned that he was a online sexual predator after seeing him on Dateline NBC, where he was caught in one of their hidden camera investigations. Dennis was the last remaining pager salesman in New York City. She did not enjoy dating Dennis and had constantly been contemplating breaking up with him. Liz apparently used to date actor Conan O'Brien, who told Liz that he wants to forget their brief relationship.

Both Jack and Tracy refer to her by her last name, "Lemon." Her last name is apparently intended to imply an acerbic personality.

[edit] Personality

Liz Lemon is presumably a parody of Tina Fey herself or, possibly, her media image. In the pilot, Jack, at a mere glance, described her, apparently accurately, as a "New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single-and-pretending-to-be-happy-about-it, overscheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says 'healthy body image' on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for...a week."

Liz almost always appears wearing plastic-rimmed glasses (Fey's trademark according to the Internet Movie Database) and is generally portrayed as something of a geek. Although apparently a skilled writer, she seems to have precious few social skills, as demonstrated in "The Break-Up" where, while trying to meet a date at a karaoke bar, she made jokes about politics and celebrities. When a man at the said bar asked her if the seat next to her was taken, she asked him why she should move her coat just so he could sit there.

In contrast with her friend and likely foil Jenna Maroney, Liz seems to have little interest in stereotypical female interests such as fashion. This led Jack to erroneously believe she was gay in "Blind Date." Except when she is pressured to dress more femininely, she appears in unfashionable, gender-neuter attire. Due to this, Jack very clearly does not find her at all attractive, as he repeatedly makes clear through backhanded compliments.

As demonstrated in several encounters with Jack, she seems to have left-wing politics and is most likely a Democrat. She is allergic to dogs.