Liz Lemon
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| Liz Lemon | |
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 Liz with the makeup designer's baby daughter in "The Baby Show" |
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| First appearance | "Pilot" |
| Information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Age | 35 as of late 2006[1] |
| Year of birth | November, 1971[2] |
| Occupation | Head Writer for TGS with Tracy Jordan |
| Family | Mitch Lemon (brother) Dolly Harland (great-aunt) Gray "The Hair" (third cousin) |
| Portrayed by | Tina Fey Michal Antonov (as a child in "The Head and the Hair") |
| Created by | Tina Fey |
Elizabeth "Liz" Lemon is a fictional character played by Tina Fey on the American television series 30 Rock.
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[edit] Personal history
In "Jack Meets Dennis," Liz stated that she was from somewhere called "White Haven," possibly referring to White Haven, Pennsylvania, and dialogue in the episodes "Tracy Does Conan" and "Jack Meets Dennis" suggest she was born around November, 1971. In college, she studied theater tech. She and Jenna Maroney knew each other well as early as 1996 and together dreamed of making it big. They shared an apartment in a Chicago neighborhood called "Little Armenia" and began The Girlie Show on Second City. At that time, the show apparently starred both of them.
Liz and Jenna worked for years to turn The Girlie Show into a television series, the pair of them even having to move from Chicago to New York City for it. Liz became the head writer and apparently the unofficial show runner for The Girlie Show while Jenna became the show's main star. It is not known when the television version of The Girlie Show started, but it was apparently after the year 2000 and the show had evidently run long enough to successfully find a fanbase by the time of the pilot episode. Liz and the writers apparently had a good relationship with their boss Gary, who was stated to love the show and be pleased with the ratings.
However, Gary's death is announced in the pilot and Jack Donaghy takes his place. Jack immediately decides to retool the show to make it appeal to a larger demographic, starting by firing her trusted producer Pete Hornberger and making her hire unpredictable actor Tracy Jordan as the show's new star. Liz manages to convince Jack to re-hire Pete, but Jack is insistent on making the show center around Tracy and, much to Liz's chagrin, he renames the show TGS with Tracy Jordan.
[edit] Personality
[edit] Jack's overview
Liz Lemon is presumably a parody of Tina Fey herself or, possibly, her media image. In the pilot episode, 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." Pete said that the "knitting" part, in particular, was uncanny.
[edit] Physical appearance and typical attire
In contrast with her friend and likely foil Jenna Maroney, Liz seems to have little interest in stereotypical female interests such as fashion. Her "bi-curious" shoes led Jack to erroneously think she was gay and set her up on a blind date with his friend Gretchen Thomas, the "brilliant plastics engineer/lesbian" in "Blind Date." Jack does not find Liz attractive, as he repeatedly makes clear through backhanded compliments.
Except when she is pressured to dress more femininely, Liz typically appears in casual, gender-neutral attire. She almost always appears wearing plastic-rimmed glasses and the flashbacks from the episode "Blind Date" reveal that she has worn glasses since she was about four or five. However, according to Jenna in "The Rural Juror," she does not actually need glasses. This is probably intended to parody the fact that plastic-rimmed glasses are considered to be Tina Fey's trademark in real life, despite the fact that she does not actually need glasses except to see far away.[3]
[edit] Quirks and interests
Liz is generally portrayed as something of a geek, so, although apparently a skilled writer, she seems to have precious few social skills, as demonstrated in "The Break-Up" where, while she was trying to meet a date at a karaoke bar, a man asked her if the seat next to her was taken and she asked him why she should move her coat just so he could sit there. She is apparently a fan of Star Wars (often using events from the original trilogy to explain her feelings and actions in daily life), Heroes ("I like the Japanese dude."), Ugly Betty and Designing Women. Her drink of choice is Pinot Grigio ("Blind Date", "The Head and the Hair"). She is allergic to dogs and, apparently, cats as well as "anything warm and adorable." She speaks fluent German and has evidently won at least one Emmy Award.
Liz has a strong aversion to unfairness and breaking rules as demonstrated in the opening scene of the pilot, where, when a man cheats to get a hot dog from a hot dog stand more quickly by "creating" a new line which several people from the "original" line promptly join, she responds by buying all the hot dogs and giving them to the "good people" who stayed in the original line. Later, when Liz considered quitting over Jack's changes to the show, Pete told her that she had the best job in New York and that she shouldn't, in his words, "buy all the hot dogs." This also displays the tendency she seems to have to act rashly in a fit of anger, this being more clearly shown in "Hard Ball" and "The Fighting Irish."
She also seems to have a weakness when it comes to maternal instincts. In "The Baby Show," the day after Liz told Jenna that she wanted to have children, she found herself bombarded with offers from people who wanted to be sperm donors or surrogates for her. Liz was also asked by a makeup artist to hold her baby daughter while she was doing touch ups on Jenna, but, after leaving Jenna's dressing room, Liz blacked out and found herself standing in her apartment, still holding the baby in her arms, thanks to the baby's hypnotic effect on her.
[edit] Political views
As demonstrated in several encounters with Jack, she seems to have left-wing politics and is most likely a Democrat.
In "Jack-tor," she is shown to be somewhat afflicted with "white guilt," which Tracy uses to manipulate her in the episode. She later says that her white guilt "is to be used only for good, like overtipping and supporting Barack Obama." She is very concerned about not being seen as racist as demonstrated by "The Source Awards" where an African-American man she was dating played the "race card" when she tried to explain that they weren't a good match.
Liz seems to be anti-Catholic as illustrated in her "Dennis Cons" list. When asked what religion she was in "The Fighting Irish," she replied that "I pretty much do whatever Oprah tells me to."
[edit] Relationships
[edit] Jenna Maroney
Liz stated in the pilot that she and Jenna worked for years to get The Girlie Show and a series of flashbacks in "The Rural Juror" reveal that Liz and Jenna have known each other since at least 1996, having been roomates together in a Chicago neighborhood called "Little Armenia". Given Jenna's uptight nature, Liz is generally forced to act as her rock. This has caused Liz some annoyance, especially after Jack increased Jenna's stress level and paranoia by hiring Tracy and changing the show's name.
Liz has been seen complaining about Jenna's erratic tendencies behind her back, usually with Pete. In "The Aftermath," Jenna got mad at Liz when she overheard Liz describe her to Tracy as being "paranoid" and "neurotic." Jenna once slept with Liz's brother Mitch and said he was terrible in bed. (Liz says Mitch hasn't been right since he was in some kind of skiing accident.)
[edit] Pete Hornberger
Liz and Pete have known each other since about 1996 and he's possibly the closest thing Liz has to a confidant, especially since Jenna, her closest female friend, is far too anxious about her own life to function as such. Liz seems to have more genuine respect for him than anyone else on the show.
[edit] Tracy Jordan
Liz has not really tried to pursue a relationship of any kind with Tracy, preferring to focus her energies on keeping his craziness in check. She is typically friendly towards him, though mainly to further this end. She refers to him by his first name, whereas he calls her by her last name, "Lemon," or by her full name, "Liz Lemon."
[edit] Jack Donaghy
Liz, unsurprisingly, does not particularly like Jack Donaghy, though, to his face, she is generally respectful of his authority, though she has dared to be rather sarcastic on a few occasions, most notably when first meeting him in the pilot. The degree of her dislike for him tends to vary from time to time. Like Tracy, he usually refers to her as "Lemon." When addressing him, she usually calls him "sir," though, if he's being particularly intimate, which he has tendency to be, she has been known to call him by his first name. When referring to him, she has been shown to call by his first name, last name or full name.
[edit] Love life
According to Pete in "Blind Date," Liz has had some really terrible boyfriends in the ten years that he's known her. It is implied that she once dated Conan O'Brien in "Tracy Does Conan" when there is obvious romantic tension between them. Conan has told Liz that he wants to forget their brief relationship. Liz was dating Dennis Duffy, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, until the episode "The Break Up," in which she learned that he was an online sexual predator after seeing him on Dateline NBC, where he was caught in one of their hidden camera investigations.
In "The Head and the Hair," Liz and Jenna considered hooking up with two men who they had nicknamed "The Head" and "The Hair," referring to one them being intelligent, but lacking good looks and vice-versa. However, Liz was surprised when she was approached by "The Hair" (whose real name turned out to be Gray) since she had assumed that she was meant for "The Head." Despite a rocky start, their relationship went fairly well until Liz and Gray discovered that they were third cousins.
In "Up All Night," Liz received an anonymous Valentine that, in a true Charlie Brown twist, turned out to have been sent to her by accident. Later, in "The Fighting Irish," Jack told her to fire the bottom ten percent of her staff and Liz realized that "Other Liz" actually worked for her. What followed was chaos as Liz ended up firing not only "Other Liz," but the entire accounting staff and even Pete. In the end, Jack hired back "Other Liz," but had her transferred to Connecticut.
[edit] List of pros and cons on Dennis
In "The Break Up", Jenna suggests that Liz make a list of pros and cons about Dennis to help her to decide to break up with him or not. Her pros and cons on him were as follows:
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† — This "con" is not shown on camera, but Liz is seen adding to the list after she sees Dennis on a "To Catch a Predator" episode of Dateline.
[edit] Her name
Interestingly, her full first name, Elizabeth, is also Tina Fey's full first name, though Conan O'Brien is, so far, the only "character" to refer to her as "Elizabeth" rather than "Liz." Her last name, "Lemon," is apparently intended to imply an acerbic personality and possibly also to make her full name alliterative.
[edit] References
- ^ Age 35 as of "Tracy Does Conan"
- ^ From her age in "Tracy Does Conan" and the fact that her birthday was "last week" in "Jack Meets Dennis"
- ^ "Tina Fey, Specs Symbol" from the Washington Post
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Episodes: Season One |
