Liz Lemon
Elizabeth Miervaldis Lemon is a fictional character and the protagonist of the American television series 30 Rock. She created and wrote for the fictional comedy-sketch show The Girlie Show and later TGS with Tracy Jordan.
She is portrayed by Tina Fey, who is also the creator of the series and its showrunner. Fey received a Primetime Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Television Critics Association Award for her performance. She is also the first person to win a Critics' Choice, Golden Globe, Primetime Emmy, SAG, and TCA Award for a singular performance.
Personal history
Liz Lemon was born in November 1970. Raised in the town of White Haven, Pennsylvania, Liz is the daughter and second child to Dick Lemon and Margaret Lemon. Liz's parents are outwardly very optimistic and supportive of her, but privately they dislike many of their daughter's attributes and life decisions, as revealed during the climax of "Ludachristmas." On Saturday, December 6, 1985, she made her one appearance as a varsity football player, having forced her high school to lift the gender segregation rules of the team. Though her parents displayed a supportive demeanor, they were too embarrassed to attend her game despite claiming to have been present. Liz's elder brother, Mitch, was a victim of a skiing accident the following day, when he was a high school senior. Afterward, he experienced anterograde amnesia, remaining "stuck" in the day before the accident, thinking for the next 22 years that he was 17 years old and the year was still 1985. In the episode "The Moms", her mother is said to have worked as a secretary at Sterling Cooper and to have "repeatedly lost virginity" to Buzz Aldrin while the town pervert watched from the bushes.In the season 3 finale, "Kidney Now!", it is revealed that Liz attended elementary school with musician and actress Sheryl Crow, co-starring with her as one of a pair of kidneys in a 5th-grade musical. While Liz believes that the two were great friends, Crow only vaguely remembers her and refers to Liz as a "loser." Fey is in reality 8 years younger than Crow.
She first saw Jack Donaghy and Tracy Jordan, and spoke with Jack by telephone, in 1986 while watching a live telethon alone in her parents' basement on prom night. Immediately after church choir member Tracy fell and realized his talent for getting laughs as a performer, Liz placed a prank call to the pledge line, which was answered by Jack, then a young executive from GE's poisons division. Liz claimed to have been a nurse in the war, who was impregnated by General Electric when he was Colonel Electric. Jack's loyalty to GE and his handsomeness impressed Don Geiss, who transferred Jack to the microwave ovens division.
Liz was inspired to become a writer by Rosemary Howard, the first female head writer of Laugh-In. She mentioned that she used to teach improv to senior citizens. In high school, Liz believed she was an unpopular "nerd" that all of her classmates picked on, only to learn two decades later at her 20-year high school reunion that she was, in fact, the universally disliked class bully. She attended the University of Maryland on a partial competitive jazz dance scholarship, studying theater tech for which she still has an outstanding student loan. She spent her junior year abroad in Frankfurt, Germany, and speaks passable German, which is, in her opinion, "the most beautiful language in the world". She struggles somewhat with the language in "Episode 210", mixing up verbs and misunderstanding a group of German TV executives. In "Gentleman's Intermission" she tries to evade speaking with Avery Jessup on the phone by pretending to be German, but is caught when Avery speaks fluent German in response. In "Larry King", she sings "99 Luftballons". Liz also has a longtime goal of learning Spanish, at which she eventually makes some progress during a period of community service in "Respawn."
In the episodes "Believe in the Stars" and "Cooter", Liz states that she did not lose her virginity until she was 25.
Liz met Jenna Maroney in 1993 when Jenna was studying voice at Northwestern University. By Liz's own words, Jenna was "slutting it up" to get car dealership owners to put her in their commercials. The two shared an apartment in a Chicago neighborhood called "Little Armenia", and together they dreamed of "making it big". While in Chicago, Liz reportedly tried to be an actress, but the only job she was able to book was a phone sex line commercial. Liz and Jenna began The Girlie Show at Second City. They worked for years to turn The Girlie Show into a television series, which NBC picked up, resulting in the pair moving to New York City for it. Liz became the head writer for The Girlie Show, while Jenna became the show's main star.
In the pilot, it is announced that Liz's former boss Gary has died and Jack Donaghy takes his place. Neither Jack nor Liz recognizes the other from their brief conversation twenty years earlier. Jack immediately decides to retool the show to make it appeal to a larger demographic, starting by firing Liz's trusted producer Pete Hornberger to make room in the budget to 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 her chagrin, he renames the show TGS with Tracy Jordan.
Since 2005, Liz has lived in an apartment at 160 Riverside Drive ; her apartment number is 3B. When the building is converted to condominiums, Liz purchases both 3B and 4B with her earnings from Dealbreakers, with the encouragement of both Jack and Jenna.
Liz has also evidently won at least one Emmy Award. In addition to her responsibilities behind the camera, Liz occasionally acts in TGS sketches.
Throughout the seasons, several people have questioned Liz's gender. She always replies that she is really a girl and "that doctor was a quack." She serves as best man at the weddings of both her former sex partner Grizz and her mentor Jack. When Gretchen Thomas tells Jack she thinks Liz looks like Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack initially assumes she means Jason Lee. She also once demonstrated that she is easily able to grow a mustache in less than 48 hours.
After TGS is canceled, Liz tries being a stay-at-home mother to her newly adopted children, while her husband Criss works as a dental receptionist. Both soon recognize that they are ill-suited to those roles and that Liz has considerably greater earning power. With Criss taking care of Terry and Janet, Liz takes over as producer of former lover Griz's series, Griz & Herz. The children visit her on set.
In the final episode, as a nod to St. Elsewheres finale, "The Last One", Liz's life serves as the inspiration for a sitcom that is pitched by her great-granddaughter 100 years in the future. The series is green-lighted by immortal NBC president Kenneth Parcell – even though the series includes every one of the banned features on the list that Kenneth gave to Liz when beginning his tenure in "Hogcock!"
Personality
After a mere glance at her in the pilot, Jack sums up Liz as a "New York third-wave feminist, college-educated single-and-pretending-to-be-happy-about-it, over-scheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says 'healthy body image' on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for...a week." This is confirmed by Pete to be accurate, commenting that the "knitting" part, in particular, was uncanny.Liz is generally portrayed as something of a "geek." So, while she is an skilled writer, she seems to have very few social skills. For example, while she was trying to pick up men at a karaoke bar, a man asked her if the seat next to her was taken, leading her to ask him why she should have to move her coat just so he could sit there. Liz is often shown to be generally insecure and holds a strong concern for how she is perceived by others. Liz is sometimes dismissive of others, a personality flaw that can be connected to her lack of social skills. Assessing Liz's personality up to near the end of season 3, Jonah Weiner described her as "an eternal 13-year-old tomboy—scared of sex, obsessed with Star Wars and meatball subs" and as "cling to a fantasy of presexual, junk-food-munching adolescence".
Liz has a rather satirical sense of humor. She has frequently been shown to be a stress eater, a trait she shares with Jack. Even though she often ingests high amounts of junk food daily, she seems to keep her weight under control, perhaps because she does not seem to have proper meals. According to Fey, the character is not bulimic; "She just likes to eat". Liz does have some knowledge of cooking, though she admits to only using her oven to warm her jeans in the morning. She is allergic to both dogs and cats, as well as "anything warm and adorable." However, she does believe her allergy to dogs is psychosomatic, as she mentions that a dog bit her during the time of her first period.
Like Fey, Liz is a big fan of the Star Wars film franchise, often using events from the original trilogy to explain her feelings and actions in daily life. For example, in the episode "Jack the Writer", she compares Jack to the Sith lord Darth Vader, and contemplates that entering his office is like "stepping onto the Death Star". In "The Source Awards", Liz mentions that for the four past Halloweens in a row, she has dressed up as Princess Leia. She has also dressed as the character during jury selection to be disqualified from serving. Liz considers Attack of the Clones to be the worst film of the series. Criss Chros proved his love for her when responding to her "I love you", with "I know", quoting Han Solo's response to Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. Facing the improbability that she will ever have a daughter, Liz offers the child-sized Leia costume which she had bought sometime in the past, to Jack for his daughter Liddy. Eventually, in "Mazel Tov, Dummies!", Liz gets married wearing a Princess Leia dress with which she had replaced her earlier, highly flammable costume after inadvertently setting it alight in "The Funcooker". She imitates Yoda in response to Jack's lamentations in "Hogcock!"
She is also a fan of the television series Heroes, in which her favorite character is Hiro Nakamura, Lost, Little People, Big World, Ugly Betty, Top Chef, Designing Women, NCIS, The Real Housewives of New York City, and The Daily Show. Her favorite drink is white wine with ice cubes and Sprite, a blend she calls "Funky Juice." She is obsessed with men in green tights. As for "Cleveland", her ringtone is "Ride of the Valkyries", which she and Jenna consider a reference to What's Opera, Doc?. Her ringtone for "Future Husband" is "Fuck the Pain Away" by Peaches.
In the episode "The Fabian Strategy", Liz reveals that the three things she likes in the world are Ina Garten, "sweater weather," and when Muppets present at awards shows. Over the course of the series she has shown an aversion to exposing her feet under any circumstances, except when she mistakenly believed that Oprah Winfrey counted high-heeled flip-flops among her new "favorite things." She usually prefers sex to be either non-existent, fast or "only on Saturdays".
Liz appears to be a Philadelphia Phillies fan. In "Reaganing," it is mentioned that at nine years old, she sported a Pete Rose inspired haircut and had posters of Mike Schmidt and Tug McGraw in her bedroom. It is also noted that she uses a "Phillies Sport Wallet" in "It's Never Too Late For Now." In the season 6 finale "What Will Happen to the Gang Next Year?" Liz tells Jack that in payment for officiating at his and Avery's renewal of vows, "I get your Yankees tickets on A-Rod bobble head day. And I'm going to throw that thing in front of a train. Go Phillies!"
By "Christmas Attack Zone," Liz has learned the meanings of body language through watching The Mentalist. Because of her newfound talent, she dubs herself "The MentaLiz". She is unaware at that time that The Mentalists original Dutch version, Van der Hoot: Psychische , was based upon Liz's subordinate Sue LaRoche-Van der Hout's former career as a police psychic.
In contrast with her friend and foil Jenna, Liz seems to have little interest in stereotypical female interests, such as fashion. In "Blind Date", her "bi-curious" shoes led Jack to erroneously believe she was gay, and set her up on a blind date with his friend Gretchen Thomas, the "brilliant plastics engineer/lesbian." Except when she is pressured to dress more femininely, Liz typically appears in casual, gender-neutral attire. In earlier episodes, she almost always wore plastic-rimmed glasses, though she started to wear them less frequently over the course of the series. Flashbacks reveal that she has worn glasses since she was around four or five years of age. However, according to Jenna in "The Rural Juror", she does not actually need glasses.
Some of Liz's social problems stem from past slapstick events that left her with long-suppressed traumas and phobias. For instance, in "Reaganing", Liz reveals to Jack that she once ended up falling while wearing roller skates and with her underwear around her ankles, while covered by a Tom Jones poster. When Jack learns she also freaked out when hearing a snippet of music in Las Vegas, she realizes that anything that reminds her of Tom Jones triggers her revulsion to sex. She was also unable to eat eggs for a long time, and Kenneth's impromptu therapy helped her understand why: her aunt's husband left her, causing the aunt to feed a pre-teen Liz unappetizing egg-based dishes while making bizarre requests for company.
James Poniewozik of Time had this to say about an Indecent Proposal type situation involving a former classmate in the episode "Leap Day": "his story is about more than that. It's about nerdy, neurotic Liz recognizing that she is, after all, a legitimate object of desire—a successful, smart woman who looks like Tina Fey—and embracing it rather than being freaked out by it."
Liz also has a tendency to say "blërg!", "nerds", "what the what?", "nertz", "nerf herder", "whuck?" and "son of a mother" as replacements for curse words; she has also notably used the phrases "shut it down", "I want to go to there", "deal-breaker", "pwomp", and "by the hammer of Thor!".