Tracey Wigfield builds comedies around groups whose members cannot leave one another alone. We value her feel for ensemble work, but The Four Seasons finds her actors supplying warmth that the jokes do not consistently match.
Fi1m perspective
In The Four Seasons (2025), a couple’s problems quickly become everybody else’s concern. Friends treat one another’s relationships as something they have a right to discuss, and the writing understands how familiar that interference can feel. This is useful territory for Tracey Wigfield, whose work favours workplace and friendship ensembles. We rate that instinct more highly than the results here. Too many complaints are recognisable without being made funny, leaving a decent relationship comedy short of the sharper jokes its cast could handle.
Her career took shape in the writers’ room of 30 Rock (2006), where she rose from assistant to writer and producer. The Mindy Project (2012) followed, with Wigfield writing and executive-producing alongside Mindy Kaling. She then created Great News (2017) and developed the Saved by the Bell reboot (2020). Writing, showrunning and directing The Four Seasons, co-created with Tina Fey and Lang Fisher, marks a move away from broad farce towards more grounded, middle-aged relationship stories. The change makes sense for someone interested in how groups function, though familiarity brings its own difficulties.
We warmed to the holiday company in The Four Seasons because Colman Domingo makes spending time with them pleasurable even when the laughs are intermittent. Fey’s Kate sits within a cast that also includes Kerri Kenney and Will Forte, and there is no shortage of acting ability. Their warmth keeps the series watchable through exchanges that need better jokes. Wigfield and her fellow writers understand how a friendship group can intrude on a marriage, but they do not always give these particular people enough to distinguish their grievances from anybody else’s.
Wigfield has spoken about the difficulty of keeping scenes interesting when they are not packed with jokes. That matters to her work as a director as well as a writer: a conversation still needs to hold our attention when nobody is being funny. The Four Seasons too often relies on its cast to make an ordinary complaint worth hearing again. There is room for her to pursue this quieter comedy without returning to the speed and breadth of farce. We would welcome the next step, provided the actors get something less familiar to say.
Biography
Tracey Wigfield is an American comedy writer and producer. Born on 19 June 1983 in Wayne, New Jersey, she graduated from Boston College in 2005 with degrees in theatre and English.
She began her television career as a writers' assistant on the second season of 30 Rock (2006), advancing to staff writer and producer. Wigfield co-wrote the series finale with Tina Fey, winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. She later wrote for The Mindy Project (2012) and created the NBC sitcom Great News (2017).
Wigfield developed the Peacock revival of Saved by the Bell (2020) and is a co-creator, writer and executive producer of the Netflix series The Four Seasons (2025), alongside Tina Fey and Lang Fisher.
