Lang Fisher has spent most of her career writing other people's shows, and her gift is carrying a hard subject through a comedy without dropping the jokes. Running her own, on The Four Seasons, the structure holds and the jokes thin.
Fi1m perspective
A Lang Fisher episode tends to take on a subject the show around it would normally step past. He Said, She Said, her 2019 episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, takes workplace sexual assault into a precinct comedy built on running gags and a captain of unusual stillness, and it keeps the show's tone while it does so. That is a harder trick than it looks. Most of her career has been spent doing it under other people's names, which is the staff writer's lot: the credit is on screen, the voice is somebody else's.
The career has the shape of a long apprenticeship. She began at The Onion and Onion News Network from 2007 to 2011, joined 30 Rock for its final season in 2013, where she co-wrote A Goon's Deed in a Weary World, then wrote and co-executive produced on The Mindy Project from 2013 to 2017, directing one episode, and on Brooklyn Nine-Nine from 2017 to 2019. The turn came in 2020, when she co-created Never Have I Ever with Mindy Kaling and ran it for four seasons. Then, in 2025, The Four Seasons, co-created with Tina Fey and Tracey Wigfield, both from the 30 Rock days, and the first time she directed episodes of a show she also ran.
What she is good at is structure. Fey has described her as the one in a rewrite who connects the dots and gets the story from A to B, and you can feel it in The Four Seasons, which always knows where a scene is going even when the scene is not worth the trip. What she is less good at, on that evidence, is making the trip funny. We scored it 64. There is warmth in the cast, and Colman Domingo makes the holiday company worth an evening, but the writing too often settles for a marital grievance we recognised without a joke we had not heard. We kept waiting for the line that would sharpen the complaint into comedy, and more often than not the scene ended before it came.
The nearest thing to a reservation about her, ours included, is that she has worked one seam for nearly twenty years: the workplace, the friendship group, the ensemble that makes everybody's relationship its business. 30 Rock and Brooklyn Nine-Nine are the better evenings, and she is in both sets of credits, though we could not tell you which lines are hers, which is rather the point of a good writers' room. The Four Seasons is the first time we can. It is decent, and it is the same seam, worked with less appetite. The interesting question is what she writes when there is no group of friends left to write about.
Biography
Lang Fisher is an American television writer, producer and director. She graduated from Columbia University in 2002 after attending Fountain Valley School of Colorado. She began her career as a staff writer for The Onion and its television spin-off Onion News Network.
Fisher wrote for the final season of 30 Rock (2013). She served as writer, director and co-executive producer on The Mindy Project (2013–2017) and as writer and co-executive producer on Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2017–2019). She co-created the Netflix series Never Have I Ever (2020–2023) with Mindy Kaling, acting as showrunner, writer and director. She co-created The Four Seasons (2025) with Tina Fey and Tracey Wigfield for Netflix, serving as co-showrunner, writer and director.
