Mary Tyler Moore was a working woman whose story lines were not always about dating and men. They were about work friendships and relationships, which is what I feel my adult life has mostly been about.

Tina Fey points to The Mary Tyler Moore Show as a formative model for representing women’s adult lives as centered on professional identity and platonic bonds rather than romance. By emphasizing “work friendships and relationships,” she highlights a kind of emotional and narrative realism often underrepresented in popular culture: the workplace as a primary community where ambition, loyalty, conflict, and support play out. The quote also functions as a quiet manifesto for Fey’s own comedic and creative priorities—stories in which women’s independence and camaraderie are not secondary to dating plots, but the main event.